Best graphics card optimized for Grasshopper?

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on February 20, 2011 at 5:47pm

Hi AJ,

 

certainly there are no cards that have been optimized for Grasshopper. Grasshopper and Rhino are fairly typical application as far as system demands go, so whatever works for other software tends to work well for Rhino+Grasshopper as well. There are a couple things to keep in mind though:

 

1) Rhino and Grasshopper are mostly single-threaded applications. It is true we are trying more and more to multi-thread certain operations, but the time when a high-core-count really makes a difference is a long way off. So, you should care more about the clock-speed of the individual cores in your machine than the sum total. I.e. 2 cores running at 2 GHz each are better than 4 cores running at 1.8GHz each, even though the former will often be marketed as a 4GHz machine and the latter as a 7.2GHz machine.

 

2) Rhino is an OpenGL application, so video cards that are awesome at DirectX but suck at OpenGL are a bad choice. There's a lot of information out there already about which cards are good and which are not.

 

3) Grasshopper uses GDI+ to draw its interface and GDI+ is rarely hardware accelerated. Basically, the faster your memory and the faster your individual CPU cores the faster Grasshopper will redraw.

 

4) Grasshopper should run on Rhino5 64-bit, so if you're getting a new machine make sure you have a fully 64-bit platform and a 64-bit Windows version to go with it. I'd also recommend at least 8GB of fast RAM.

 

5) If you can spare it, Solid State Hard-drives are faster than old fashioned spinning contraptions.

 

6) I also highly recommend getting a second screen, so make sure your vid-card is good enough to handle two displays.

 

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on February 20, 2011 at 6:21pm

"I'd also recommend at least 8GB of fast RAM."

 

Till now I thought  that my 8GB of RAM would be far enough to work with EVERYTHING with best setup :D But as you say "at least", I will consider buying next 2x4 RAM ;] (next step will be buying new motherboard to run even more RAM)

 

Hate Moore's law ! :D