i think my brand new VIDEO CARD is broken

A bit off, but also on topic.

2 hours to render that picture in draft quality is not good at all.

I do a rendering like that in less than 1 hour and I have an el cheapo graphics card, thus CPU's doing all the work.

There's no caustics, no physics and no kinetix in that image as far as I can tell, so it should go much much faster.

This tells me your 3d card is doing nothing at all, and I even suspect that not both CPU cores are being used.

With that card and dual core you should be able to render it in 20 minutes max.

You better check the 3d graphics driver section in 3DMax, cause something isn't right.

And check your CPU usage in taskmanager while doing a render.

I bet that one is on 100% and the other maybe 20%, and your graphics card is just hanging around.

SLI by the way, is totally unnecessary for 3dStudio.

So sell one card, keep the PSU, get in touch with Autodesk support to ask how to set up your rig to maximize it for 3dMax, and your done.

Greetz,

edrik said:

im using revit architecture maybe that's why it renders slower than max

But I can't believe the performance would be that bad.

I did faster renderings on my pentium II.


It's worth to check the 3d driver section within the software.
And check if there's an option to select multiple cores.

Or contact the support desk of the software.

You can ditch that second card, cause it won't make any difference in 3D software.
Only games benefit from SLI.

True the SLI won't help with rivit on a regular computer. But the Nvidia Quadro work stations can use SLI but they are expensive. Nvidia Quadro Plex Visual Computing Solution

edrik said:

whoah that's too expensive
maybe an iceQ4 card would do almost the same for a lower price ?
what do you guys think

No doubt that is the big time for that type of work and very expensive. Depends on the level of committment I guess.

I did read that running more Ram 12GB helps Revit and that the 64 bit version of Rivit is supposed to be much better.

8.) Consider Revit 64. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know much about this one, but I understand that 64 bit version of Revit will be available to subscription users very soon. Rumor has it that 64 bit rendering runs significantly faster and smoother. Graphics gurus can speak volumes about this more than I, but with a basic understanding, 64 bit has got to be better than 32 bit no matter how you slice it.