What's the best video card for ZBrush?

[CDEdwards]

I'm getting ready to take the plunge and buy a new video card, I'm afraid that my Creative Banshee Blaster is too weak to handle advanced graphics with. Voodoo is dead, but I'm hearing good things about GeForce2 and Radeon.

My current system specs:
AMD Athlon 850MHz
256MB SDRAM
6GB UDMA33 Hard Drive
13GB UDMA33 Hard Drive
20GB UDMA66 Hard Drive

Technically, I'd like to know what is better for ZBrush, 3D, 2D, or both? I know that when modeling we're at 3D, but otherwise we're at 2.5D. Is 2.5D really a subtype of 3D, or 2D? How much of a role does memory and CPU power play into the rendering aspect of ZBrush? Would I better off with an average video card and spend the extra money on processor, memory and hard drive upgrades, or use what I've got and get a powerful video card?

Thanks. :)

[Digits]

I am far from an expert but I doubt Zbrush really taxes a video card, not like a 3D game with a high framerate, however if you want to survive Deathmatch and not get fragged, get yourself a Geoforce 2. My opinion the best board out there, Geoforce III is out but very expensive right now but has some amazing new features.

Sounds like you have a nice system, similiar to mine, which should last you awhile. Ram is always good and cheap nowadays. That has been the greatest improvement in my Zbrushing is adding RAM

[CDEdwards]

Thanks for the info Digits. I will probably be fraggin' some enemies in my spare time when I'm not feeling creative, but hopefully that won't be often. ;)

[ZBC Moderator]

Hi CDEdwards,

I think you would notice the most difference with system performance if you upgraded your RAM. The amount of system memory is very important to ZBrush, since real-time rendering required a lot of memory. Although ZBrush uses virtual memory when it runs out of available system memory, virtual memory is much slower than RAM.

I recommend www.pricewatch.com (http://www.pricewatch.com) as a good place to shop for memory. They have 256M PC133 DIMMS starting out at $39. Be sure to make sure that the RAM is compatible with your chipset though, since many motherboards or chipsets can't use high density memory which is often lower priced.

Maybe others can recommend other upgrades that they've made that have made a difference for them...

-ZuZu :)

[CDEdwards]

I found this article that helped me decide which card I want to get. :)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/video/3dmax/

[william]

Hey CD,

Thanks for posting the link. I'm sure I will find it very helpful. See I got the voodoo 5 5500 AGP in this pc.

Here is a link of Ram. I bought from them and hear that they offer a good grade. They're a division of Micron. www.crucial.com (http://www.crucial.com)

[A l m a r K]

Be aware that AMD CPU's are fussy about the memory used. My brother tried at least 3 differnet DIMMS before it would work. The system sinply refused to boot up.