New Card for 3d Rendering/Dual 27.5 Hanns G's

[Bgrizzmayne]

Hey guys-

I've been looking at some cards and considering upgrading to a 6870 or Nvidea 470. I currently have a Geforce 8800 ---- however I'll be getting my second Hanns G 27.5 and will be doing rendering on both monitors.

My motherboard only supports one full size PCI Express slot, so two cards isn't an option. Is the 6870 recommended for rendering and or playing starcraft2, Dragon age, etc?

Looking to spend below 300 dollars.

btw...the res on both monitors will be 1920x1200....not sure if it's possible to do eyefinity with them but that'd be sweet

 

[Lord_Exodia]

Wait for the AMD 6900 series coming within the next 25 days. 2 things will happen

1 Newer and better cards will come out for you to chose from

2. Prices on current cards will come down so that card your looking at for $300+ that seems out of your reach may fall within your budget.

 

[King Icewind]

No Eyefinity only "works" with 3 monitors or more. You can enable it with two, but you have a bar right down the middle making it useless.

And yea I would wait for 69xx.

 

[Furystrike]

Consider how much more developed the nvidia cards are in terms of GPU processing. For my non-gaming purposes, CUDA is light years beyond "ati stream". Of course, if there isnt a difference for your rendering programs, then its not a big deal

 

[Bgrizzmayne]

Thanks for the advice guys- definitely will wait for the 69xx series. Any speculation on how much they'll cost at launch?

But fury, what do you mean by the advanced capabilities for Nvidea? The 3d rendering I am doing is in Zbrush and Autodesk's 3dsMax and Maya (mainly maya). I have heard that running dual monitors with maya is quite graphics intensive, and i'm not sure if my geforce will be able to handle it. Plus, I am wanting something to make SC 2 pop a little bit more. (i'd like to run it on high settings)

But my primary goal is for the Rendering stuff, so if Nvidea's may excel at that, I probably should go with that.

 

[King Icewind]

In my experience with 3DS Max which is very similar to Maya and made by Autodesk, the processor was the most important for rendering not the video card.

 

[Furystrike]

But fury, what do you mean by the advanced capabilities for Nvidea? The 3d rendering I am doing is in Zbrush and Autodesk's 3dsMax and Maya (mainly maya).

I'm not really sure about the nature of those two programs - it would be worthwhile to check out a benchmark of ATI vs nvidia.

For gaming, the cards are essentially on the same level. For programming, its a different story. For example, I can use the CUDA language inherent to nvidia cards to greatly accelerate my MATLAB programs. I cannot do the same on any ATI cards (at least easily). In general, nvidia cards are much more friendly to non-gaming applications. This may or may not be true for your rendering programs, however.