Hello All,

Me again.

We now have 2 machines working with Nvidia QuadroFX (4400) cards. (those who followed my last thread will know why)

One is running WinXP64 and the other standard 32bit XP.

Both run 3dsMax2009 for rendering.

So I have tasked myself to install all the latest drivers and optimise these beasts and found I had a ton of reading to do on OpenGL vs Direct3D etc yada yada yada.

After reading long and protracted reasoning around whether OpenGL is outdated or Quadro’s are a rip off, I finally found myself installing the latest performance drivers available from Nvidia for 3dsMax2009 only to find that they are actually titled:

Performance Driver: Maxtreme 2009 D3D v11.0

So I am back on here to ask why this is a Direct3D based driver if Nvidia and Autodesk keep waxing lyrical about OpenGL being the basis of design and rendering packages and the weapon of choice in creating renders with CAD and Max?

Have I missed a switch somewhere or followed a link incorrectly?

Or does this seem like a blatant coding turnaround by Nvidia?

Can you provide a link to where you are reading Autodesk waxing about OpenGL?  Max has been reengineered as I understand it, to work more efficnently with Direct3D, and Nvidia complied by enhancing the driver to better use D3D commands.  So Nvidia is following the choice by Autodesk and is not foisting a decision on you… Maxtreme is D3D based because Autodesk went with D3D and all but abandoned OpenGL it seems.

That is why everyone here recommends you use DirectX9 with Max (any recent incarnation)… because Max has been optimized for D3D.  DirectX9, I do not believe DirectX10 is fully supported yet since many people did not have cards capable of utilizing that updated model, and since they are not really backwards compatible.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Following are some Nvidia and Autodesk text screens.

“Technical Specifications
NVIDIA QUADRO WORKSTATION GPU
> 12-bit subpixel precision
> Up to 128 textures per pass
> Eight (8) multiple render targets
> Fast 3D texture support
> Jumbo (8K) texture support
> Hardware-accelerated antialiased
points and lines
> Hardware OpenGL overlay planes
> Hardware-accelerated two-sided lighting
> Hardware-accelerated clipping planes
> Third-generation occlusion culling
> OpenGL quad-buffered stereo
(3-pin sync connector)
> Hardware-accelerated pixel read-back
NEXT-GENERATION SHADING
ARCHITECTURE
> Full Shader Model 4.0 (OpenGL and DirectX 10)
o Vertex Shader 4.0
o Geometry Shader 4.0
o Pixel Shader 4.0
> Unlimited Shader Lengths
> FP32 texture filtering and blending
> Non-power-of-two texture support
HIGH-LEVEL SHADER LANGUAGES
> Optimized compilers for Cg,
OpenGLSL, and Microsoft HLSL
> OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 10 support
> Open source compiler
PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATIONS
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) /
Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) /
Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) Applications
> AutoCAD
> CATIA
> DeltaGen
> Inventor
> PDMS
> PLM
> Pro / ENGINEER
> Revit
> Solid Edge
> SolidWorks
> and many more…”

***************************************************************************
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html
***************************************************************************
AutoCAD 2008 XP 32 bit 15.09.08 OpenGL 2008‐04‐23 1.87 MB
AutoCAD 2007 XP 32 bit 15.08.06 OpenGL 2007‐02‐01 1.43 MB
AutoCAD 2005‐ 2006 XP 32 bit 15.07.03 OpenGL 2006‐02‐13 2.6 MB
AutoCAD 2004 XP 32 bit 15.07.01 OpenGL 2006‐02‐03 1.6 MB
AutoCAD 2000 ‐ 2002 XP 32 bit 15.06.06 OpenGL 2003‐01‐11 3.9 MB

***************************************************************************

There isnt a single mention of Direct3D in all that. It is VERY OpenGL-centric and thus I went with the above info and followed that OpenGL was the driver of choice.

But having gone back through a lot of the available reading from Nvidia and Autodesk I find that - yes in fact D3D is now the preferred underlying code and I shall amend the installations to be optimised for this instead.

Many in my group have switched to using OpenGL simply because it doesnt crash.