Would appreciate help with finding graphics card

[Sean_C]

Hello,I am building a computer.I am currently looking at graphics cards, this computer is going to be doing computer animation using software like Maya, and 3ds Max. I am looking for a graphics card that can support 2 screens and have more than 256 MB of available memory. I am not very knowledgable with computers so any help would be appreciated. What would be a good choice for a graphics card?

 

[Rustyy117]

Hey and welcome to the forum

Firstly I'd suggest an nVidia Graphics card as it'll have CUDA support which basically means that tasks usually performed heavily by the CPU can be aided by the GPU, decreasing render times ETC...

Some more info is needed though, such as:

1) Budget? (please include currency)
2) Will you be gaming?
3) What will be the rest of the system spec's?

 

[Dennycrumbubble]

Ditto on the Nvidia suggestion above, but you should also take into account AMD's cards because of their Eyefinity support (running as many as 4 monitors simultaneously). I'm not too familiar with Nvidia's reputation with multiple screens, but assuming you have no price restrictions and the rest of your system is up to par, your decision basically comes down to what you want more: faster processing or better multi-screen results.

 

[Rustyy117]

Ditto on the Nvidia suggestion above, but you should also take into account AMD's cards because of their Eyefinity support (running as many as 4 monitors simultaneously). I'm not too familiar with Nvidia's reputation with multiple screens, but assuming you have no price restrictions and the rest of your system is up to par, your decision basically comes down to what you want more: faster render time or better multi-screen results.

Good Point, Just to add that an nVidia card will support two monitors.

 

[Dennycrumbubble]

Good Point, Just to add that an nVidia card will support two monitors.

I just read up on their TwinView architecture. It seems pretty solid. The only thing I find an issue with is it only supports 2 displays. Of course this will suit his needs perfectly, I'm just big on future proofing haha (for both technology and personal choice ).

 

[Sean_C]

Alright, thank you everyone

The budget is $2000 USD ,but that is for the whole computer. I still need to search for everything else for this computer, i just started with the graphics card.

There will be some gaming on this computer

the rest of the specs are just a minimum I got from the Autodesk help site

Windows: Intel® Pentium® 4, AMD Athlon™ processor with SSE3 instruction set support (or higher)
2 GB RAM
10 GB free hard drive space
Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card
Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
DVD-ROM drive
HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI

Any assistance with building the rest of the computer would be appreciated as well. Thanks

 

[Sean_C]

Also, I will be attempting to run the Unreal development kit on this computer
so the specs for that program are

Windows 7 64-bit
2.0+ GHz multi-core processor
8 GB System RAM
NVIDIA 8000 series or higher graphics card
Plenty of HDD space