[Derek Peter]

Good morning/afternoon all,

My father-in-law is looking to upgrade his current work computer and wants to upgrade to something with more “oomph.” I have been able to easily piece together a computer that will work well for him, but I am getting a little hung up on a video card. I have built a few gaming computers in the past, but never a machine that is a dedicated workstation that may benefit from other things than resolution and RAM.

My question is, will I/he see any performance difference between a workstation specific video card such as the PNY Quadro 5000 2.5GB card seen here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003X26T7K/?tag=pcpapi-20

versus something like an nVidia GTX970 4GB unit like seen here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NJ9BJ8G/?tag=pcpapi-20

Are the current gaming video cards powerful enough to be able to handle all the textures, bandwidth, assemblies, etc that are demanded by the 2020 Design software? One of his big wants is FAST. Something that renders and shows really well. He does really nice, high end designs so there is “value” in the design being impressive to show to his customers and his current machine isn’t up to that task.

Price isn’t a HUGE sticking point, so if someone has some excellent experience with a specific video card or computer setup, feel free to make a suggestion. We are hoping to invest into a machine that will last him 6+ years and then upgrade again if necessary.

Thanks in advance!!

-Derek

[2020]

Hi Derek,
We strongly recommend a dedicated graphics card by either NVIDIA, ATI or AMD. Please avoid systems that only have integrated graphics, such as Intel HD Graphics or AMD APUs.

*To validate whether your (selected or existing) graphics card is supported please refer to the Redway3D supported GPU list for a detailed list of recommended graphics cards.

[Robert LeBeau]

hey if you go to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ they have bench marks for cpu’s, video cards, and other hardware items…not sure if youve looked there but it should have the info ur looking for

[Anna Gibson]

will this card work? <span style=”color: #4b4f56; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.36px; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: #e0edff;”> GeForce® GTX 745 with 4GB DDR3</span>

[Anna Gibson]

The page you posted no longer exists

[Mike Langensiepen]

The GTX745 is a great card but I would say that just as important is the CPU – get the BEST i7 processor that you can afford that can be overclocked. Maybe even consider multipl Xeon processors. I am pretty confident that your F-I-L will want to start using the Panoramic 360 feature as much or more than the standard renders and the Panoramic doesn’t seem to use the video card at all but maxes out all the cores on my i7 based laptop.

The Redway 3D engine used in Design is not the best performance rendering engine out there. I’m about to try and get a design from 2020 Design to the Unity platform or find some other method of enhancing it to do true 3D walkthroughs rather than spherical jpgs (which is what the Panoramic 360 is).