What video card do you use?

[mr-miley]

NVIDIA Quadro 2000D here 

Oooo, and I'm the first one on Page 3... whoop whoop!!! (doesn't take much to please me )

[Artistico]

I didn't think the Graphics card made much of a difference to Terragen, or does it? Anyway, mine is a Nvidia GeForce GTX560M, which was one of the best ones I could get for my workhorse laptop 2 1/2 years ago. It's still my main computer, though I will upgrade to a desktop with a big, big screen one of the next few years.

Screen size is really my main issue with just using a laptop. 15.6 inches isn't much when you're working with photos, artwork and design. Processing speed might be an issue if I work a bit more with Terragen where one can never have enough of it...

[Zairyn Arsyn]

Last fall I upgraded my PC to a EVGA Geforce 770 GTX 4GB Classified GPU (from a Geforce 460).

No, TG doesnt use the GPU for rendering, or even the 3D preview, tho' I think I once heard it can improve performance in the node network window, if say if you have tons and tons of nodes, but that several years ago, so I could be wrong about that.

[Oshyan]

TG does actually use your graphics card for the 3D Preview, which is the main reason we asked about which card people use in this thread. Some people occasionally have stability issues and it often seems related to the graphics card, so for support reasons we wanted an understanding of the most common graphics cards/chipsets in our userbase.

- Oshyan

[kalwalt]

i have a Nvidia GT540M on windows7 i have no problems, but on linx i need to use the bumblebee project because nvidia use the optiums technology. At this time i can't use with Terragen, normally if i want to run an app with my Nvidia card i need to run in a console with the command optirun. But if i run with:

Code Select Expand

optirun wine tgd.exe
i get an error and Tg do not start. I'm using TG, under Linux , with my intel integrated card, it is slower that in windows, and sometimes with complex scene it crash.... i need to investigate on this, maybe asking support on the bumblebee project or on the wine forums.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

How much of the GPU does TG use?

I don't know much about programming, but it would be cool if in some future, distant version of TG it had an performance option with the 3D preview to take more advantage out of higher end GPU's with CUDA or OpenCL or whatever.

just an idea.

[Oshyan]

TG uses OpenGL on the graphics card for displaying 3D objects in the preview, as well as for some other UI drawing functions. Faster graphics cards do give you better performance with larger amounts of on-screen object geometry, but they do not other parts of the 3D preview (e.g. terrain or atmosphere rendering), or general rendering, faster. We're certainly interested in options like CUDA, etc. when they are practical and can handle everything that TG needs to render.

- Oshyan

[MichaelTomp]

I use Nvidia Geforce FX 5200. Arrived to the point where I have to get a better one.


_____________________________
http://www.qulix.com/

[Dune]

I noticed some blackouts lately, first in TG4, but today also in Lightwave. Error code 3 in OpenGL driver, it said once. Some other times the screen didn't come back at all, and reboot was the only option. Makes be nervous working on large files.

I have a GeForce GT610 with an old driver 9.18.13.1422. I wonder if it would be good to either update that driver, so I just downloaded 312MB's of new driver (version 378.66), or buy a better card. Especially regarding the RTP.
What's your opinion guys/ladies?

[Dune]

For the time being I have set the power management mode to 'max performance' instead of adaptive, one of the replies I found.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Ulco,

The power management mode makes no difference for me. It seemed it was switched on anyway last couple of months, while I experience the same crashes.

Don't bother a new GPU for the RTP. That's CPU based.
Good OpenGL performance for drawing of the population previews might be nice, but I'm not sure if TG really facilitates the benefits of a better OpenGL card.

Perhaps Oshyan knows more about it since he recently has a fancy Quaddro 5000 (I believe).

Cheers,
Martin

[cyphyr]

It's certainly worth keeping your drivers up to date.
Out of date drivers can come into conflict with windows components that have since themselves been updated.
I agree with Martin, you won't see much (if any) improvement in Terragen from a brand new shiney card but you most definately will in Lightwave.

[Dune]

Thanks guys. No new GPU then, for now. We'll see what happens next, just  CTRL+S a lot of times, I guess.
As for mismatch driver and updated windows; I work on an offline Win 7 machine, which won't be updated at all, so it should all be like it was years ago. Just TG is updated 

[Dune]

I'll continue the alpha thread here, so maybe someone else has an idea of what's happening here.
The event log shows some errors, like these:

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="NVIDIA OpenGL Driver" />
  <EventID Qualifiers="49152">1</EventID>
  <Level>2</Level>
  <Task>0</Task>
  <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2017-02-22T09:48:12.000000000Z" />
  <EventRecordID>5743440</EventRecordID>
  <Channel>Application</Channel>
  <Computer>Ulco-PC</Computer>
  <Security />
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data>The NVIDIA OpenGL driver detected a problem with the display driver and is unable to continue. The application must close. Error code: 3 Visit http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html for more information.</Data>
  </EventData>

3x same

------------------

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-WMI" Guid="{1edeee53-0afe-4609-b846-d8c0b2075b1f}" EventSourceName="WinMgmt" />
  <EventID Qualifiers="49152">10</EventID>
  <Version>0</Version>
  <Level>2</Level>
  <Task>0</Task>
  <Opcode>0</Opcode>
  <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2017-02-22T08:21:46.000000000Z" />
  <EventRecordID>5743425</EventRecordID>
  <Correlation />
  <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
  <Channel>Application</Channel>
  <Computer>Ulco-PC</Computer>
  <Security />
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data>//./root/CIMV2</Data>
  <Data>SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99</Data>
  <Data>0x80041003</Data>
  </EventData>
  </Event>

------------------

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-PerfNet" Guid="{CAB2B8A5-49B9-4EEC-B1B0-FAC21DA05A3B}" EventSourceName="PerfNet" />
  <EventID Qualifiers="49152">2004</EventID>
  <Version>0</Version>
  <Level>2</Level>
  <Task>0</Task>
  <Opcode>0</Opcode>
  <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2017-02-23T07:36:59.000000000Z" />
  <EventRecordID>5743493</EventRecordID>
  <Correlation />
  <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
  <Channel>Application</Channel>
  <Computer>Ulco-PC</Computer>
  <Security />
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Binary>340000C0</Binary>
  </EventData>
  </Event>

And literally hundreds of warnings, all at the same time, strangely. It seems like a memory issue of my GPU, doesn't it?

[Rumburak]

I also had some strange errors with OpenGL and Terragen a while ago (http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20766.0.html). It has been even stranger that these errors disappeared after installing the latest drivers for my logitech devices. Maybe updating some further drivers could help in your case too.

Concerning GPU: At that time I used an overclocked GeForce GTX780Ti - and this board is not really known for perfect stability, so I still don't know exactly what originally caused the error.
Today I use two GTX980 (rendering in blender is pretty nice with these) and there are no problems so far.