Loklo Media 3D Animation Blog

Ahh… finally. I found a review that gives me what I’ve been looking for for months now. But it’s my own, that I’m creating now. I couldn’t find any hard proof of whether or not the Firepro v4800 (top-entry level) Workstation video card is better or worse than my existing Gigabyte Radeon HD4870.

Unboxing Video:

Fatures-wise, they are similar.

Both with 1GB GDDR5 VRam, both ATI.

Firepro has 2x Display Ports + DVI, Radeon has HDMI + DP + DVI.

MY question was this: in 3DS Max, real world scenario, which is better.

My quick conclusion now – the FirePro, but only marginally.

Here’s the system I was using:

• Asus P5N-MX uATX board, 4GB Ram (2x2GB PC2-6400 OCZ), Intel Q6600 Quad OC’d to 2.92GHz
• Windows 7 Home Prem x64, dual monitors – Samsung 226BW + Acer x203w – both at 1680×1050. Both With DVI, Samsung (primary) as DVI, the Acer via adapter (HDMI from radeon, DP from FirePro).
• 3DS Max Design 2010 SP1, running in Direct3D mode (9).

As you can see, the system is nothing short of budget/average for a home workstation.

Test Scene: from a current project… it’s got 1637 Objects, 77 Shapes, 4 omni lights (no shadows), 1 Camera, 95 Helpers (all groups I think). 2,755,615 Faces (1,451,778 verts). Mostly camera animation, texture Offset animation, object visibility track fades in and out. (It’s a technical training animation for a water plant.) Almost all objects have Mental Ray’s A&D material, some are using texture maps, most are non-square images, and not all are shown in the viewport. (How’s that for real-world testing??!!) Using scene lighting, not default. Not using Hardware shading, as it seems slower and less than good/accurate – for either card.

Findings with Radeon HD 4870

Not too bad.

• Smooth+Highlights: Slinging it around with an average of two viewports open, sometimes one, usually between 6-16 FPS according to Max’s built-in stats tool.
• Wireframe: nigh-unusable
• Smooth+highlights+edged faces: nigh unusable (let’s be real… who cares about numbers, right?)
• Viewport Transparency: glitchy – in smooth+highlights, which is the only mode I’m almost always in, object visibility seemed almost random. VERY hard to be efficient at animating things that fade in and out, without constantly referring to curve editor/track view.
• Viewport Transparency: never tried in edged faces mode, due to performance.
• other: Camera object z-buffer seemed to be backwards, always underneath the geometry until the view was nudged, showing the camera briefly (or showing it in Wireframe, which was slow).

Findings with FirePro v4800

Not Too Bad.

• Smooth+highlights: about the same as above – which didn’t really surprise me.
• Wireframe: holy fast, Batman! Definite driver improvements there, which makes sense. I’ve never seen anyone play a game in wireframe mode. Average about 18-26 FPS
• Smooth+Highlights+Edged Faces: A little slower than Smooth+Highlights, but usable.
• Viewport Transparency with Smooth+highlights: still glitchy… awww, this isn’t looking good.
• Viewport Transparency with Smoth+Highlights+Edged Faces: Now we’re talking! it Looks Accurate! And it’s at a usable, comfortable speed! (around 7-10 fps). This might be my new viewport shading mode of choice.
• other: camera object good in all view modes… yay!

Oh, and the Firepro allows me to comfortably use 8xAA also, which I never (recently) bothered to test on the Radeon, for obvious performance issues.

Bottom Line Conclusion: Up to you. I Paid just shy of $200 CAD for my card with shipping and GST (tax in Canada). If it means not screwing up timing of visibility tracks, and the ability to select the camera a fraction of a second quicker, then it’s worth it to upgrade. If you’re building a new system, and don’t have the extra cash for anything higher up, then it’s a great choice.

How does it compare to newer ATI 5XXX series? New GTX 4XX series? I don’t know. If someone gave me these cards to test them back and forth, I’d do it. Hopefully this comparison/review gives enough real world data to bridge the gap between gaming vs. workstation.

Cheers!

Update: It seems This page gets some traffic from people looking to get the 4800 for Blender.  It does work very well with Blender – I can’t complain.  But I never complained before… Blender’s viewport is stunning (speed-wise) compared to Max, for the most part.  High multi-res still slows down, even with 2.53 and the v4800 – with VBOs turned on.  But in sculpt mode, it’s faaast.  Exit back to object mode, and it’s slow.  I didn’t do any real comparison between the radeon and Firepro for Blender – sorry.  But, from what I can tell, you can stick with a decent or better gaming card to save some cash.

Now I still use the v4800, but the 5900 and 7900 cards were recently released. If you want to stick with the AMD brand, then I recommend the v5900.

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I’ve got a budget Radeon HD 3450 (256mb) and a higher end HD 4870 (1gb). I did a little test in 3DS Max (2009, 32bit) in Direct3D mode to see how they fared.

Test Setup – Intel quad core 4GB ram, vista 64
Latest Catalyst drivers

Scene: 7 “bitmap” textures (in 7 different Mental Ray A&D materials), 1 MR A&D Glass (thin) preset material, and one MR A&D mat with a tiny AVI texture (animated flow arrows). (wanted to test filling of video memory too).

Scene had 1.55 Million Polygons, according to the built-in statistics. I had a steam locomotive stock model with rails and tracks and spikes as geometry, cloned (not instanced) 4 times, plus a bunch of planes (which held my bitmap materials, including UVW Map modifiers), plus a cylinder with UVW Map which held the animated flow arrows texture. Display Transparncy was set to simple/basic whatever it’s called (I’m writing on my Mac now… Max machine is shut off).

Orbiting around was ok – the 3450 kicked in the Adaptive degradation pretty quick, which I then turned off. According to the statistics, the 3450 gave me ~3.6 FPS, and the 4870 gave me ~7fps. This was playing with one maximized viewport (the way I work). Pressing the play button to play back the animated arrows didn’t change the fps on either setup.

Also using D3D caching, linear/linear and 1024/512 bitmap load sizes. Not using anti-aliasing.

So, as for this test, the 4870 is roughly twice as fast as the 3450 – whether it’s due to the larger VRAM (256 ddr2 vs 1024 ddr5), or the actual hardware, I don’t know. But it is better.
Conclusion – go for the 4870 if you’re after ultimate performance. If you’re not doing heavy duty modeling/texturing, then the 3450 is probably more than enough. I was quite impressed with it, considering I only paid $40 for it.