Suitable Graphics card for Autocad Revit (and gaming ?)

Looking for best PCI-E card around $300 for autocad revit 8.0 ( parametric 3d cad program I use primarily for architectural design) I also enjoy some fps.
Is 7800gt worth it? I was considering x800xl or x850 pro (must be single slot card)
Have noted crashes recommendation of 6600gt. Will I get good performance with this? Any Revit users? would appreciate your feedback also. Thanx

bull
i'm an architect and gamer. i haven't found one card that does it all !
NOT ONE!

the best cad cards are very different from gaming cards since a cad card is more focused on memory usage than shading and pixel renderings

professional cad cards go from 150€ to 1500€ on to 3000+€ for the uber programable ones like 3dlabs make.

you want a all rounder?? there is none.
but consider this :
A/ unless you are world champion in the gaming world , it wont matter what you take. those extra micro seconds dont mean life and death.

B/ a project that isn't top notch, a person which isn't making money, because your cards suck at cad means u wont be playing much, rather working late shifts trying to get the work done.

for 350, a nice 6800gt might do the trick. and i've seen stabilty with the last acad2005 and Wpeng drivers. not many artifacts with a high curve section coun50 to 100, arc smoothness 10000. the only time i had full artefacts was with a high density polygone (glass multipane dome) but i think i can correct that by changing the drivers.

cad cards : have you looked and fireGL cards? NVIDIA Quadro FX ? matrox? check out the nvidia and ATI sites for info. i fondly remember a matrox g400 that beat some Gef256 senseless in a FPS match many years ago. matrox still are one of the best cad card makers in your field to date. just look at how nvidia and ati have changed there current gpus to fit the matrox schematic.

read! learn!

happy hunting ^^
merry christmas!!

You start out OK but then make some bad assumptions. And what's the first three letters of assumption?

The 6600GT is a fine Open GL card. Yes, you get some small artifacts, but when you're working at home that's not a problem. The big thing here is, the 6600GT is actually FASTER than the 6800GT in some modeling applications. And the only reason I can think of for that is it's higher clock speed, I don't think the reduced pixel pipelines are a significant factor in Open GL.

You can read my 6600GT review at SysOpt to see the benchmark results in SPEC Viewperf. Yes, the 6800GT spanks the 6600GT in a couple benchmarks, but that's only like 2 out of 8, where the 6600GT comes out on top overall. And two 6600GT's in SLI spank everything I've tested all the way up to the X1800 XL in Open GL performance.

Now the 6800GS might be even better, after all it's clocked up like the 6600GT and has the fat memory bandwidth of the 6800GT. But I haven't tested the 6800GS, so I couldn't say for sure.

And here's something that's going to piss you off for sure: There's a Quadro version of the 6600GT and it cost something like 4x as much. It reduces artifacts through driver enhancements, but the performance difference in 3d modeling is not worth mentioning, let alone paying for.

Of course if you're in a studio, you'd never hear the end of it for showing a missing pixel here and a jaggy line there. But people don't build their home PC's to show off in a studio, if they model, they view the home-rendered model themselves.