Benefit from a "professional" video card for 2D AutoCAD?

[ochdx]

I'm mostly working with 2D autocad, very rarely I use 3D, and even then its nothing complicated. I'm currently running ATI Radeon HD5450 low profile video card (its a slim desktop case). I was looking at some workstation/pro cards, and it seems that ATI/AMD have a few video cards available for $100-$150 range that are low profile as well.

 

Theres the AMD FirePro 2270 and FirePro V3800 - apparently the 2270 has DX11 and OpenGL 4.2 vs DX11 and OpenGL 3.2 on V3800. But I think V3800 is a faster card? Not much information can be found on the internet.

 

In any case, am I going to see any benefit if I upgrade to one of those? And which one should I go with?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Cad64]

Are you having trouble with your current card? If not, I don't see why you would need to upgrade.

 

But if you feel you need to upgrade, and the 2270 & 3800 are your two choices, go with the 3800.

 

More than 10 times the computing capability over the previous-generation product

http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/v3800/pages/v3800.aspx#

[ochdx]

Not really having problems, but just wondering if there are any benefits from a professional card. Lets say if I up the circle smoothness, more segments, etc.

[irneb]

It's a bit of a toss-up. You'd probably not see any difference between the Radeon / Fire* ranges if your model is rather small. It's when the model becomes truly huge that the Fire* / Quadro's come to the fore. For 2D there's not much benefit in the 3D GPU, you're much more pained by the card's built-in RAM in this case and the speed with which it can communicate with the CPU (i.e. the buss speed on its PCI(e) connection). If you're mainly in 2D, I'd say upgrading to the FirePro is probably overkill with very little benefit (if not actually worse performance). Some of the Geforce/Radeons actually give better performance than the Quadro/Fire* cards even in 3D when the model is smallish, especially the high-end Geforce/Radeons.

 

Another thing you might have to watch out for, the workstation cards are optimized for 3D work. They're rarely as optimized for 2D raster work as well as the "gaming" cards are. Thus if you use something like PhotoShop you might find better performance from a Geforce/Radeon with lots of RAM. Though the Quadro/Fire* cards generally still have "some" 2D capabilities, so they're not as bad as the 3D specialization cards like the WildCat or so when it comes to 2D raster. Probably why 3dLabs is basically dead to high-end GPU's these days: They've renamed to ZiiLABS and produce "high-end" ARM chips for mobile products: http://www.ziilabs.com/

 

So in summary: I'd not advise you to just jump in and upgrade. If you're happy with your card's performance, why bother? If you only do 2D work, I'd even go as far as to say: Instead of upgrading your GPU, look at more RAM, perhaps a SSD drive, faster CPU-Motherboard-combo, in that order. Those would probably give you much more ummmfh for your buck.