FX5600 and CAD

[Edvardas]

I have a Nvidia Geforce FX5600. For university work I need to use Autodesk Autocad and Inventor. GeForce FX cards are not listed as certified, nor I can find anything about CAD support on Nvidia site.
Can any one tell me if my card has at liest "Limited CAD support". Or I will have to get a GeForce4 Ti series card.

 

[lik]

I use my 5600 With Auto CAD 2002 with no problems!

P4-2800->FSB800, Asus P4P800, 512DDR-400, Radeon 9800 Pro - 128Mb

 

[Flinx]

Autocad worked on much older cards. I believe it still works on my old 4MB and 8MB cards

Anything produced today should handle it.

The loving are the daring!

 

[Edvardas]

My biggest consern is how it will behave with Inventor. It's fully 3D design. With parts that can be rotated in 3d and so on.
<A HREF="http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=452932&id=3732797" target="_new"> Autodesk Inventor 8 Professional</A>

 

[peterfagg]

I have a similar problem, except I have a 9500 pro and use Solid Edge v14. No "commercial" cards are certified, only "professional". The program runs ok, except I have to use Cat 3.6 and even then there are occasionally redrawing errors. Any later versions (I've tried all up to 3.9 so far) seem to introduce glitches.

Basically, it should run fine. All my university computers are bog-standard cheapy cheapy things, and they all run it flawlessly, if a little slowly. Our design lab (Formula Student, British version of Formula SAE) has a GF4 Ti4800, runs fine. The only problem might be finding a driver that it works with...

Peter

 

[grafixmonkey]

The Pro cards are the Quadro and FireGL series. (not the Radeon 9800 "Pro", just in case, lol...) The difference between a pro card and a gaming card is that a pro card is built to accelerate as much of the OpenGL pipeline <i>in hardware</i> as they could do and still keep the price in the corporate workstation range. I think the Quadro FX line is the first Quadro to accelerate the entire thing in hardware. They support some nice features for working with really complex objects in wireframe, for displaying manipulator widgets even if there's a 3D surface covering them, displaying the wireframe "on top of" the fully shaded surface without needing separate rendering passes, so you can see both. Another thing they do well is have lots and lots of individual 3D views open at the same time, possibly overlapping each other in complex ways, without slowing down a lot. One thing they usually don't do well is play games. (most Geforce4 cards could play UT2003 no sweat, my Quadro4 has to crank down on the details.)

About certified drivers: Certified drivers are just drivers that the company that made your software has looked at and throughly tested and found that they work flawlessly with that version of the software. The certified drivers usually lag quite a bit, so I tend to use the newest certification candidates instead of the actual certified ones.

Some people on the forum seem to think that the Quadro cards are just the Geforce cards with better drivers. That was true with the Geforce3 and Quadro3, but it's not true of the Quadro4 or QuadroFX. Those cards actually have different processing cores than the Geforce line.

So basically, what will happen with your FX5600 is that its openGL drivers will use the card for some things and will have to do other things in hardware or in multiple passes. It will be slow in wireframe mode compared to a "Pro" card because pro cards specifically accelerate drawing of OpenGL line and circle primitives. You might have some graphics glitches because of it, because the drivers have to flip flop between hardware and software, and because the CAD application developers did not develop and test the software with the Geforce line in mind.