8 replies to this topic

[hopbin9]

I'm going to take a chance and get a GeForce GTX 580 even if the GeForce is listed as an unsupported card for Houdini.

I've been using a Radeon 4800 series card for a while without any trouble, but I need put it in another workstation so it's time for an upgrade.

If I really really should not get this card. Please post now

[hopbin9]

Ok, I got it.

Ended up getting the EVGA GeForce GTX 580 and it comes with some overclocking tools.

I'll install it later and let you know if it works with Houdini

[malexander]

The main reason we do not support consumer cards is because of the drivers. The hardware is mostly the same between the Quadro and GEForce lines, though the Quadros tend to have more memory and lower clocks than the GEForces. The real issue is the drivers. It is not uncommon to see a regression in a consumer driver due to a "5-10% increase in <cool game title>" which breaks something in Houdini. The accelerated releases of consumer drivers and the fact that workstation apps are not their target audience tend to make them much more flaky than the pro drivers. I've also found that the UI feels more sluggish with GEForce drivers than with Quadro drivers.

So, my advice to you is that if you have a stable Nvidia GEForce driver, keep it! Don't update every time a new driver is released. Or if you do, be prepared to roll it back

[aghourab]

Im using 2x 580's since their release, and was using a gtx 295 prior to that without any incident at all.

I only ever notice issues with the Geforce cards when using Maya with high performance viewport rendering switched on.

That said, my work is confined to dynamic simulations and Ive never had a scene with more than 2 textured objects since switching to the 580s.

[hopbin9]

I've been using the 580 for a month now, and it's great. Installed a 570 on another workstation and it's also been working fine.

[Nerox]

hopbin9, on 22 June 2011 - 04:34 AM, said:

I've been using the 580 for a month now, and it's great. Installed a 570 on another workstation and it's also been working fine.

What driver are you using? I just got a Zotac 580GTX 3GB and run the 295.59 driver on Fedora 16.
Using open-cl I get a 30% performance increase for pyro compared to a quadcore I7 920, 2.67 CPU. I can view about 20 mil polygons reasonably well. I would say most of it works well.

Though viewing just a grid or even an empty scene it takes about 2 sec time after I press the spacebar before I can tumble around. As far as I'm concerned this is the moment where data is copied to vram. How ever I find this very slugy, I wonder if it might be the driver version. Any recommendations?

Houdini Master Version 12.0.634
Platform:                 linux-x86_64-gcc4.4
Number of Cores:          8
Physical Memory:          11.73 GB

OpenGL Vendor:            NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer:          GeForce GTX 580/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL Version:           4.2.0 NVIDIA 295.59
OpenGL Shading Language:  4.20 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
Detected:                 NVidia Consumer
                          3072 MB
                          295.59.0.0

Edited by Nerox, 30 June 2012 - 07:40 AM.

[malexander]

Nerox, on 30 June 2012 - 07:38 AM, said:

Though viewing just a grid or even an empty scene it takes about 2 sec time after I press the spacebar before I can tumble around.

This is an issue specific to Fedora Core 15 and 16 that appears related to the processing of the spacebar state by the X server. It's not graphics driver related. I don't have a suggestion or workaround for it, unfortunately.

[Nerox]

malexander, on 03 July 2012 - 09:49 AM, said:

This is an issue specific to Fedora Core 15 and 16 that appears related to the processing of the spacebar state by the X server. It's not graphics driver related. I don't have a suggestion or workaround for it, unfortunately.

Has any one tested this on Fedora 17?

[Nerox]

malexander, on 03 July 2012 - 09:49 AM, said:

This is an issue specific to Fedora Core 15 and 16 that appears related to the processing of the spacebar state by the X server. It's not graphics driver related. I don't have a suggestion or workaround for it, unfortunately.

Do you know to which specific bug it is related in Fedora core 15 and 16? I would like to check if its fixed in 17 before I go over the hassle of upgrading. Else I'll downgrade my system to 14.