I have a NVIDIA graphics card, but when i try to install: “NVIDIA MAXtreme™” i get this error: NVIDIA %P setup could not detect an NVIDIA workstation graphics card to use with NVIDIA %P(tm). Please install an NIVIDIA graphics card.

Why is it that they say i have no NVIDIA graphics card...WHEN I DO! i even have a NVIDIA media center on the bottom right of my desktop right next to the time of the day which is 10:37.

Can sombody please explain to me why this error occurs?

Maxtreme only works on Nvidia Quadro graphics workstation cards.  Not on Nvidia consumer game cards.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

So is there a driver thats better “Proformance wise”? that supports a lower version then Quadro? I installed my NVIDIA card myself…

Just install the latest drivers from nVidia.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Maxtreme is just a name now. It used to add performance under openGL a while back when D3D was still the underdog. Since that changed, gaming cards overtook the workstation cards in performance, and maxtreme adds little to no benefits to Quadro line of the cards.

Like i said- maxtreme is just a name now.

EoDEo

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

You couldn’t be More wrong.
I keep looking to see when maxtreme will be out for 2009. Whatever the maxtreme drivers do, they do it extremely well. It’s not just a name.
I use it, and have used it for quite a while now. I open the same scene my coworkers do. The scene is very heavy and they have to display as box just to pan around the scene. I opened the same scene, shaded the scene, and rotated around with no problem. They are using D3D with the same Quadro FX 3450 I have. This is not just in once case either.

Yes, for many poly objects, like heavy characters the Maxtreme driver may not help. But for heavy architectural scenes, or in my case product scenes, it does an amazing job. We are also usually the people who usually have workstation cards since we also use programs like ProE, Rhino, Studio Tools, and other programs that really take advantage of the card.

Even with Max 2009, I still think their viewport speed blows. Or at least it will until I get my maxtreme for it.

Andy Engelkemier 03 June 2008 01:03 PM

You couldn’t be More wrong.
Whatever the maxtreme drivers do, they do it extremely well. It’s not just a name.
I use it, and have used it for quite a while now. I open the same scene my coworkers do. The scene is very heavy and they have to display as box just to pan around the scene. I opened the same scene, shaded the scene, and rotated around with no problem. They are using D3D with the same Quadro FX 3450 I have. This is not just in once case either.

I’m going to have to stay skeptical here and say that there must be some oddity with your test. Your graphic card q fx 3450 is equivalent to gf 6800. I’m not really sure how qfx 3450 goes against qfx 4000, but since they’re both gf series 6 end 800, I’m going to say that they are within 10% of each other. I’m also going to say that my 6800gt is faster than my qfx 4000 or at least as fast. Only place where quadro is faster (not noticeably, but faster nonetheless) is openGL and SPECViewperf test. In is d3d to maxtreeme comparison as well as graphic to graphic card comparison they are about the same, with slight edge to 6800gt due to faster memory and core.

I’m going to suggest reading my post here.

In case you don’t feel like reading much, know just this- any 100$ card today will be at least 10x faster than your current card. In case of ati HD3870(180$) speed is going to be about 50x faster (actual and not an exaggeration)

Andy Engelkemier 03 June 2008 01:03 PM

Even with Max 2009, I still think their viewport speed blows. Or at least it will until I get my maxtreme for it.

May I assume that you’re using windows Vista? Or at least the same 3 series old geforce ;) ?

P.S. For Quadro to GeForce comparison go here.

EoDEo

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

I am not using Vista, but we only use workstation cards here. We do product design and use ProE. it’s kind of a must as that works primarily on OGL.
10x faster? Is that like a 3ghz computer will render 3x faster than a 1ghz computer? Because we all know there isn’t a bit of truth to that.
there is a huge difference between benchmark testing and actual use. What I’m talking about here is actual use. I have an old 3 series geforce at home on a super old computer. It still kicks butt if you just compare it to one of the “faster” $100 cards today so long as you don’t throw bump mapping and things like that at it. It just doesn’t have the instruction set for that. But plain old 3D data, it does great. I don’t use it anymore, but I thought i’d throw that in there for example. I loaded up 3dsmax on a friend’s computer who had a more recent card and his didn’t handle my data Any better than my old 3 series geforce. So what’s this extra speed for?

I really don’t care what the specs are. Show me a card that works, show me practical application and speed that way and I’m sold. Just telling me it’s faster means nothing. I’ve seen benchmarks before that didn’t pan out in the end. Andy why do so many cards get a huge improvement in actual speed when they get new drivers? Their specs didn’t change.
Nvidia, although I don’t like it, basically rips us all off because they write different drivers for the workstation cards even though they are pretty much the same. But they also consistently run faster at many of our tasks.

In my every day use I use max with a plugin called nPower. If you aren’t familiar with it, it keeps the nurbs data inside max editable. That way I can change the polygon resolution whenever I want. It works well with our workflow. Straight poly’s, I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but when keeping the original npower data, which is nurbs based, I have noticed a huge increase in speed when using the maxtreme drivers. So for me, it’s worth it. Not all workflows will benefit. I won’t disagree there.

We will be using Autodesk showcase for something soon, and there it just looks like straight up speed and Tons of memory, so we are thinking about building an SLI rig with a bunch of 500 dollar 1gig gamer cards. I’m not confident it will work, but I can’t argue with the specs....yet.

Is that like a 3ghz computer will render 3x faster than a 1ghz computer?

Similar but no. It’s more of a: is a quad core cpu really 4x faster than a single cored one? And in case you don’t know answer to that, let me be the first to tell you- current intel core2 quad 6600 running at 2.4ghz is 90 times (90x!) faster than intel Pentium 4 Prescott 320 (single core) also running at 2.4 ghz (for 3ds max rendering). The technology advances so fast that you really cant compare apples to apples anymore. And for a more fair question (although irrelevant) is 4 cored core2 quad 6600 4x faster than itself running on only one core? Answer is No. It’s about 380% faster- ie 20% shy of full 4x.

have an old 3 series geforce at home on a super old computer. It still kicks butt if you just compare it to one of the “faster” $100 cards today so long as you don’t throw bump mapping and things like that at it.

I agree that there is a limit to how much juice you need. But you were the one that threw in “cannot pan without display as box”. If so, you need a faster card. If not, no amount faster card will matter. Its like ATi and nVidia now. ATi is 3x faster but its 600fps compared to 200fps – both much higher than needed 30fps.

Show me a card that works

I’d be glad to… but since distance is likely a problem, getting a 100$ card for yourself might be cheaper than 200$ ticket to here ;)

We will be using Autodesk showcase for something soon, and there it just looks like straight up speed and Tons of memory, so we are thinking about building an SLI rig with a bunch of 500 dollar 1gig gamer cards. I’m not confident it will work, but I can’t argue with the specs....yet.

SLI never worked in Max and I don’t think that’s about to change.
And for the record any 500$ GAMING card you buy today will be tons faster in anything you throw at it (given it has same/more ram- not a problem since your card has 256mb of ram as I understand it) Today- you cant find a 200$+ card with less than 512mb of ram.

In conclusion, try any of the latest cards and see how well they do. I agree that no amount of benchmarks relates to actual speed at hand. (which reminds me how a “slower” AMD 2500+ cpu feels 2x faster than intel p4 @ 3.6ghz under regular day to day use. No test will show you that.)

EoDEo

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

90x faster? Really? I mean, Really? So If I do a 1 minute rendering on on my quad core computer then run it again on the single core computer it will take 90 minutes? Dude I don’t think so. i could run the same rendering on my old P3 1Ghz computer and it won’t take 90 minutes. that’s just ridiculous.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying but be reasonable. Try not to put your opinion where fact should go. Or maybe you are getting confused with percent and times? Also, I’ve got a dual 2.0 Ghz computer and a dual dual core 3.2ghz computer. They do the same rendering and I only see about a 10-25% increase in speed depending on the render. according to what you are saying I should have seen about a 260% speed increase.

the reason I threw in the fact that they had to display items as box is because it’s the same card. We are using the same card, but with different drivers I can do Much more. So why is mine so much faster? Drivers. Not hardware speed.

Also, the SLI I was talking about isn’t for max. It’s for Autodesk showcase. i haven’t looked into that enough to know if it’s supported. it was just a thought. I’m going to see if we can get a gaming card to compare and see what kind of differences in speed I can get. My original argument was for maxtreme. Those drivers are Much better than the drivers that come with the quadro cards. I haven’t yet compared them with that of a gamer card. It’ll be a while till I can do that though, since money is hard to come by unless it’s easily justified. I’ll try it out eventually though. Also, I’ll only be able to test it on the type of scenes we work on, so it won’t always be true for everyone.

90x faster? Really? I mean, Really? So If I do a 1 minute rendering on on my quad core computer then run it again on the single core computer it will take 90 minutes? Dude I don’t think so. i could run the same rendering on my old P3 1Ghz computer and it won’t take 90 minutes. that’s just ridiculous.

Hehe. I know it sounds ridiculous. The thing about that is that I own both of the aforementioned machines. And yes- what my quad core renders in 1sec, my Prescott p4 renders 1min 30sec. I didn’t wait 90 hours to check, but it scales nicely in 1:90 fashion. Its scene dependant naturally, but in most scenes (I work) its like that. Personaly tested- multiple times.

Also, I’ve got a dual 2.0 Ghz computer and a dual dual core 3.2ghz computer. They do the same rendering and I only see about a 10-25% increase in speed depending on the render. according to what you are saying I should have seen about a 260% speed increase.

How do you figure that?

So why is mine so much faster? Drivers. Not hardware speed.

That’s another thing I wanted to address first time you mentioned it, but it slipped my mind. I’ll try to be brief, but there is just so much to say.. so please bear with me.

I’m going to guess that you don’t know much if anything about CUDA and the gf 8 series of cards. I’ll try to be brief about this. In a nutshell its like this: Intel’s fastest core 2 quad has raw speed of about 50 gigaflops. nVidia 8800gtx card has about 300 gigaflops. (for reference ATi HD 3870x2 has ~ 1 teraflops raw speed). When you look at the numbers its easy to see that graphic cards are way superior to modern CPUs. So why do we use CPU at all? Its all about drivers and software optimizations.

Its not that we don’t have the hardware to do it, its that the current software logic is biased and based on logic that single core is going to be doing all the work. That core 2 quad 6600 I mentioned earlier being 90 times faster is true in max rendering, seeing how 3ds max is one of the few programs optimized to work in multi core setting. That same CPU would hardly be any faster for 99% of older games and software.

Same problem is with current graphic cards. They don’t have general purpose processors, but by nature, they are all dedicated to something. GPGPU (general purpose graphic processing unit) is something that’s a buzz word for some time. It doesn’t take an Einstein to see that if current GPUs could do other tasks CPU would be greatly overrun. Look at it like this: quad core CPU has 4 cores/ 8800gtx has 128 / ATi HD 3870x2 has 640… just some food for thought.

nVidia took a good step forward with its GPGPU CUDA programming language and as of recently announced reward for anyone that optimizes LAME (mp3 encoding) for their CUDA. If any programmer makes it utilize 8800gtx fully , we could encode 1hour of music to hifi mp3 in mere seconds. Getting CUDA to run LAME encoder is as easy as clicking go (to programmers), but making it use all available hardware resources is another thing completely. And with huge amount of processing cores, parallelism is where all is at today.

I’ll take a brief look at the current CPU technology of core 2 architecture compared to netburst (Pentium 4). On clock per clock basis, core 2 is about 2 times faster than netburst. If you calculate that to quad core vs old single core P4, you should get that new quad is 4x2 times faster. Well that’s true for most things- 3ds max rendering isn’t one of them. Changes are so numerous and vast that any apples to apples comparison is imposible.

/
Also, take a look at current max viewport’s performance. Its single core. Look at reactor- single core. Look at particles- single core (not all, but most of them are) And its not like that dual core CPUs are scarce today. It’s that multi core logic programmers are scarce. Rendering speed has been a bone to too many people and that’s the only reason its optimized. When you look at hardware industry in general- dual core support is rare, multi core support is even rarer. Rendering is one of very very few bastions where multi core means something.

/
Also, if you look at my post here.

You will see how nVidia constantly has better drivers and is able to beat ATi with their inferior hardware. Its not that ATi is stupid or anything, its just that nVidia focuses on games, and ATi on “professional” approach (trying to put it nicely). The thing there is that ATi card will perform better in Max than its nVidia counterpart, while nVidia card will perform better in games than its ATi price range counterpart.

I’ll only be able to test it on the type of scenes we work on, so it won’t always be true for everyone.

The difference in the underlying architecture of the cards is evolved beyond gf 6 series that not only you, but all will benefit from it- regardless of the scene type. Trust me.

EoDEo

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