OK we're getting warmer... Are we sure that current gamer cards by Nvidia aren't employing (or able to employ) hardware overlay planes though?
In my experience with a Geforce 6800 Ultra 256MB over several months of low-poly work under Windows, I found very few instances of what I'd seen in earlier cards that could be targeted as display errors. I certainly experienced nice stable work. Admittedly polygon counts were low, but texture memory usage was quite high for this project.
The one instance that sticks out is a wackiness in the UV mapping of a single-texture, animated vehicle. That is, when the wheels started rolling, the texture went crazy in Maya, even though it looked fine in 3DGS's model editor. I never chanced to test whether this was Maya's problem with the hardware or Maya's problem in general.
As I've gone with Quadros for desktop setups with my business, I will continue doing so, but sounds like I'll have to take a chance with a GeForce PCIe for the home machine. The difference in cost for a 512MB board vs Quadro is exponential right now.
QUOTE(Dark_Knight @ 11/17/05, 09:54 PM)
If one is on a tight budget then opting for a Quadro FX 1300 can be a good decision for price vs performance as the card can be found at low cost. Though as Joojaa pointed out opting for a more current DCC graphics card can offer better performance with highend software such as Maya. Alternatively a non-DCC graphics card such as the current Geforce 7800 GTX may prove useful though like all such cards will lack highend features found in DCC cards such as Hardware Overlay Planes. This is the same no matter what OS you're running. As for stability I've noticed improved stability with non-DCC cards running Maya on Linux than running on Windows.
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