Ok, I finally made the plunge and purchased Zbrush 3, and I’m curious as to what the folks here have to say about my processor, memory, etc., and if my setup is sufficient to run Zbrush well. Here’s my stuff:
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.21 GHz, 1.25 GB of RAM Physical Address extension.
I use Windows XP, and have 188 GB free on my C: drive. Not sure if there’s anything else I need to post, so let me know if there is.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
more RAM!!
processor and graphics card fall behind. Zbrush eats ram. 1.25gb would drive me insane. I give zbrush the full 4gb it can use and I wish it would take more.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the quick response. Any other takers?
Update to Vista64 or Windows 7 RC 64 so you have a 64-bit OS and 6GB or 8 GB or RAM to leave the full 4GB RAM free for ZBrush.
Processor is OK. Could always be faster, but what you have should run nicely for a lot of projects.
You’ll want a pressure sensitive tablet. An Wacom Intuos 4 or Cintiq will become very desirable if you want to do a lot of sculpting. Sculpting with a mouse will loose a lot of ZBrush’s power.
You have plenty free on your disk drive.
The good thing about ZBrush is that it makes good use of the system you have and you can upgrade/enhance as you can afford.
Zbrush4 is due out if a few weeks, so specs are still unknown, but historically Zbrush goes pretty light on your graphics adapter (GPU) so you’re probably OK. A seperate ATI or Nvidia chipset is more desirable than “integrated graphics” from Intel, but it may not make a difference in your case.
Another question then.Does Vista still have problems with game and programs? I’ve heard it has a bunch of technical issues and bugs, but that was awhile ago. How is it now?
I think Vista SP1 (about 8 months ago) fixed most of them. SP2 (about a month ago) certainly got more. I have Vista64 running on a handful of machines here and don’t have problems with most current games and all our software (Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Pixologic, Roland, Yamaha/Steinberg, Native Instruments, etc., etc.) seems to work just fine.
Vista isn’t quite as snappy in the interface with Aero turned on, but this can be turned off. Vista does a lot of background processing to keep your file system indexed. This is real handy when quickly searching for lost files, memos, emails, client assignments, etc. you can’t fine, but can chew up background cycles. It can be shut off with 3rd party tools if you don’t like it.
Program launching in Vista SP2 is almost as fast as XP.
Another rap on Vista initially was the lack of 64-bit drivers when it first came out. That has been pretty much resolved with most current hardware we use.
We expect we’ll go to Windows 7 once our software vendors are ready, but that won’t be likely until next year. In the meantime, 64-bit systems let us get a lot more done.
hmmmm i see. Sounds like an option that I’ll look into. Thanks for the insight Kerwin. 