Ok, so what are my options considering mental ray and GPU cards?
In fact there are some things i havent quite understand:
Does CUDA help Mental Ray during rendering? What part of a gpu card helps in viewport visualisation? Does it worth to buy a Quadro card (cause are too expensive)? Do quadro cards help only in visualisation issues or help in rendering too? Can I do the same job with a high end gaming card?
Please help me, I m not getting along with computer specs I just wanna work 3ds max and all CS suite with a card that worths buying ;)
thank u in advance and i apologise for this subject that has come over and over on these forums

ps. im planning also to use VRAY so consider that as a fact too :)

3ds max 2010 x64 sp1 | Mental Ray

i7 920 @ 2.67GHz / ASUS P6T deluxe / 12GB RAM Corsair dominator DDR3 / ATI Radeon Sapphire 6950 HD 2Gb ram / Velociraptor 150GB 10000 rpm / OCZ vertex 2 SSD 60GB

Your GPU is not used at all for rendering with mental ray. It can be used for rendering with iray or quicksilver and is used for your viewports in Max.

thanulee, if you own ati 4870 you have the maximum fps in viewports that 3d studio Max up to 2012 can utilize. If you want more fps, get faster CPU. All added GPU power will be wasted for Max viewports.

Getting quadro 600 will lower your viewport fps by 20-30%. However, you will be able to use it in both iray rendering and Adobe Premiere CS5 since it is an nivida card.

However, if you care about Premiere, you should get decent card like gtx 560. Refer to this site to find our what GPU’s are actually supported and why.

If you care about iray (you do arch viz previews), you should consider getting gtx 580 with 3gb of ram. Iray uses all available GPU cores (unlike Max/Premiere), and needs video ram for same reason regular scenes need regular ram. If you do high resolution rendering 2k+ with multi milion poly scenes, you should get a real quadro card since they have a lot of ram. Quadro 6000 with 6gb of ram is the only version worth above gtx 580.

Two things to look out for:

1) You really should try to use Premiere cs5 right now, and decide if you need more speed. Its pretty snappy even without a cuda capable card on a modern quad core system.

2) While here, you should also try iray, as it is now. It has many many many limitations, so you might find yourself not using it at all.

If both 1 and 2 are true for you, getting an upgrade for ati 4870 will serve no noticeable purpose if you don play games as well. Gtx 560 is about 2x faster than 4780 so games will play noticeably faster. (only true if you game in full HD or higher)

Im using mental ray and i ll be using Vray soon. What do i have to consider?

Mental ray cares only about your CPU. Get as fast one as you can get. Dont run out of ram. Render.

Try vray. Pick the better renderer for you. Render. Good luck :)

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.