What??? You got Nvidia for a graphics machine? FireGL! Or if you needed consumer level card, Matrox Millenium G400 Max. This should have been a given. You're making art, not viewing it through mainstream gamers eyes, lol. I dig the Samsung TFT, but for office use only. I think you should have gotten a flatscreen 19" CRT w/ .25 (or lower) aperture unless of course space is an issue. The Radeon 8500 isn't much better than the GF3. Still looks like ****, .

I like both Intel and AMD processors, both are fast. Although G4 is much faster for multimedia, I don't think I can get used to the functionality of it (how the OS works).
1GB should be plenty for now, 'til you start working exclusively in 600+dpi.

Yes, my school has firegl's in ther dualy pentium 4 machines. But, the quality difference, is well, minimal. Although I definately notice it and prefer the firegl's, they are also slightly faster. But seriously, talking abuot Price/performance nvidia is the only way to go, I had an oxygen freshman year, it was pretty fast, and it had great quality, but cost over 1,000. Now NVIDIA is MUCH faster and half the price. IMO very much comparable to the firegls, I have no qualms about using my comp over the schools. And the samsung flat screen, well, it rocks, I love it. Not that its perfect, its better than a crt and worse than a crt. But its SOOO much easier on the eyes, thats the main reason i have it!!

For example, I opened up a couple old files that had my old oxygen chugging, this machine was whipping it aruond like it was nothing. I also tested a scene in MAX with 932,000 polys and the system didnt bog down too much, I would say it was running about 4-5 frames a second. the fact that it actually worked, is fantastic, I would never break 100,000 polys on a single model, thats just insanity. And I could run it up to that with little problem in max. MAya is another story, that program is much slower than max. Probably take MAYA up to 20,000 and still be functional, any higher and things start getting annoying. Maya is the best piece of **** program. Its damn good but its buggy and slow.

Someday I intend to keep fully up on the technology curve. But it's ridiculous to consider anythign but NVIDIA as a student IMO. They practically drove half the gaming market out of business, and E&S quit making their own chips. Along with other big names which decided, heck, well just make boards with nvidia chips since ours cost 3 times as much and is only half as fast.

I had a friend who had the 3Dlabs GVX-1 and his roomate got a GE-Force, my friend was disturbed to find that he could have saved several hundred for the same performance, minus some negligible quality issues.

Of course now 3dlabs is selling the wildcat since intergraph went under, and thats a slick board, faster than the firegl even.

MATROX is on my **** list. Until they really prove themselves. I had their G200 and they never released the mother f'in OPEN GL drivers for the stupid piece of *****, so I just sold it.

The (Matrox) Millenium G400 Max has been discontinued for over a year. Matrox now offers the G450 and G500 chips - both of which suck for gaming compared to even a GeForce2 MX400.

I tend to care more (a lot, like 99%) about image quality (texture & shading, color tone, and clarity) than performance so long as the performance is tolerable. I didn't think the Oxygen was that great. The only 3D program I use is Bryce4, and that's for animation of 2D images. There were noticable artifacts, and the antialiasing wasn't that great (looked cheaply done, like Nvidias fake ass oversampling, ).

The Matrox G450 does suck, but it's perfectly suitible for office and graphic design work. I actually still have a PCI Matrox G200 laying around somewhere, I loved it. Played Quake2 wonderfully too, no OpenGL problems. G400 I love praise and use as its successor.

Side info you might find interesting: I actually really liked the image output of Voodoo5 cards, as their texture rendering and color tone were excellent. It lacked detail and clarity however (as blurry as GF1). The consumer level card that I think has the best image quality besides the G200/400 is S3 Savage 4. It's total piece of **** when it comes to performance and drivers, but damn does it render images beautifuly.

open gl isnot the place for image clarity and tone anyhow, its always going o be a rough draft of the render, I do lots of test renders, onmy system its not a problem its the only way your going to get the true lighting scenario anyways

I also got the G200 like the day it was released, waited about a month went with oxygen.

The most important thing for me as a 3D artist is the fluidity of the working envirionment. WHich means fast hardware.

heh, I am working on my final right now,

Here is a link

http://www.wearestudios.com/picture1.htm

various crap there, download the girl skipping .avi, its the latest test render, took about 2 hours to render (eeek), luckily playbast, or open gl render takes about 1 minute. Still not finished, its due tomorrow, I know the arms are stiff and ****, im working on it, other than that let me know what you think!

I also realize that her shoes were bright green, and quite ugly, but when youve got a color selector with so many millions of color to choose from sometimes you choose that really bright ass green not really realizing its going to be icnredibly ugly in the render.

3D is not my area, I tried Rhino3D, said the heck with it during the first week, .

Graphic Design is my area, and this doesn't require professional level graphics cards (I don't do video), so the stuff I'm saying is pretty much nonsense. I just happen to have weird taste in stuff, as many of you probably already have figured out.

Food for thought:

I prefer analog picture to digital despite the resolution and clarity of digital video (hint, same side for audio, rather have DTS than stereo for movies though, )

I work in mostly vidid primary colors, black and white, or grayscale which helps in the fact that I like abstract art. However, I have sheer appreciation for both warm tone (for color) and cool tone (for b&w), which plays large role in my photography.

I understand completely about the need for fluidy in your line of work. It was frustrating working on landscapes in Bryce4. I remember it took like 4 hours to render one 1280x1024 scene. Animations took just as long due to large amount of frames.

I reformatted last weekend, and I haven't downloaded all the different codecs, quicktime, real audio and stuff yet. I couldn't view the girl skipping one, what did you compress it with?

Rhino 3D sucks, last time I used it the program didnt even support animation, plus it's 100% NURBS. I've never been a fan of Nurbs, takes too long to do a complex model with, unwieldy. Maya has a new process called SUB-D, this is VERY nice, it's based off of poly's so you have much greater control than NURBS and yet retaining the smoothness of NURBS. Plus, SUB-D is much "looser", it's like playing with clay, where as NURBS is kind of rubbery and stiff.

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FireGL is an ATI product now, but Diamond/S3 used to own the Fire product line.