I'm building a PC which is primarily going to be used for CAD. The CAD program is yet to be decided. The CAD projects are small to medium sized building plans. So anything up to... say, a four floor, 24 apartment building at the most. These are just building plans, so we don't need fancy rendering, self-reflections, etc. Just lots of wireframe building structures in 3D. And if mechanical stress calculations are part of CAD, then we'll be calculating that too.

I'm not bothering with a certified CAD card, because they're crazy expensive and probably beyond what we need.

I'm budgeting around $200 for a card [would go higher for the right card], and once I pick the right card I'll design the system around it. If it turns out that the system can't handle a future project then it'd be simple to upgrade the video card.

This video shows an EVGA GTX 660 SC card in action on CAD, but I don't know how that compares against other cards in the same price range.

Does anyone here have any experience with using gaming cards for CAD? Any solid advice or recs?

Is GPU power or Video RAM more important? Any guesstimates as to how much VRAM I should have for building plans?

Requirements:

Two monitor outputs. DVI is still the best, right?
Decent 3D CAD performance. No fancy rendering required.

 

Just FTR, in my experience DLP is an awful place to ask for any advice with hardware.

That said.

There's a good article on exactly this here: http://blog.grabcad.com/2011/07/how-to-build-a-faster-3d-cad-pc/

I pulled the relevant section for you.

Presuming you're happy with the idea that a non-OpenGL graphics card may not function entirely as desired: I would recommend whatever model of the GTX660 you can find that has the largest available amount of memory and is still affordable to your budget. However, it's worth noting that the FirePro linked in the article above is only $150 more expensive than a GTX660 and is designed for CAD applications.


In addition, I found a couple of other interesting bits on the web that you may or may not be interested in.

There's a reasonably articulate thread on Tom's Hardware that discusses the capabilities of GTX vs Quatros. I've quoted one of the more interesting sections for you below:

To counter this is an article that postulates that GTX are every bit as good as Quadro, if not better in terms of speed but aren't as precise.

 

Frankly 1 GB VRAM is enough for most stuff you'll do. I've used a 580 GTX w/ 1.5 GB Vram for Autocad, it performs ok. It's not on par with the Quadro GFX card series though, except for the low end ones.

GPU power is important since Autocad supports Cuda afaik.

 

SolidWorks RealView is exactly the kind of "fancy rendering" I don't need. Self-reflections, visible bump surface finish, etc. is never going to happen unless the structural engineer gets really bored at work one day.

Those links are great, NMB. Thanks. You and Hachi have given me a lot to think about.

Looking at Quadro cards, my dual monitor requirement is unfortunate. There's quite a large markup to 'NVS' cards which support 2-4 monitors.

I'll keep on looking.

 

Thanks, Cheddar. Hardforum.com is down at the moment. "Bad Gateway". I'll take a look later on.

 

I got my laptop 6 years ago that was dedicated to CAD (I run inventor, solidworks, and Pro-E on it just fine). It has a Nvidia Quadro FX 360M, and it ran all the modern games back then just fine (mostly WoW and AoE3). The only complaint I have about it was that Nvidia stopped making driver updates for it a year or two after I got it.


Honestly, if you're not doing heavy rendering or dynamic simulation, a standard good gaming graphics card will probably do just fine.

 

I'm going to second Anarchy on that. I got mine at the same time, (run Inventor, Autocad Mechanical for work, and Revit to play around with) and I haven't had any issues with it. The big thing is the rendering. You really don't need anything particularly special if you don't plan on rendering much.

 

How does that card perform with OpenGL "instant" rendering in the context of 3D manipulation? I've just got a stock standard ATI Mobility Radeon something card in my laptop and I've had issues rotating in 3D even in OpenGL so avoiding that would be a priority for my new build too.

 

Don't forget that if you're using Autodesk Inventor, then they've been moving away from OpenGL to Direct3D for years now. I believe the latest Autocads are in much the same position.

This response from Autodesk tech support is well worth reading.

https://forums.autodesk.com/autodes..._inventor_opengl_to_directx_evolution_788.pdf

Relevant bits:

tl;dr: OpenGL compatibility is a bitch to maintain on new graphics hardware and drivers, so they're moving to the much more stable WHQL Direct3D as their primary graphics target.

 

I've been using a self-built PC with a 3.3GHz intel processor, 12GB of 1333MHz RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX560Ti for about two years now for drawing on AutoCAD, as well as modelling and rendering models in Google SketchUp (and touching up the images in PS CS5).

No hiccups at all, and no noticeable lag - at least not any that's detrimental to my creative process. Maybe a bit of stutter here and there when I've got high-res textures loaded up the wazoo and am strafing and orbiting the camera in SketchUp, and rendering projects in SU takes from 3 to 15 minutes at maximum. Though obviously that depends heavily on how many extra wireframes/objects I'm sticking into the background to make things pretty.

TL;DR: Anything good enough for playing modern games at High and above graphics settings is more than good enough for anything but the heaviest, largest structures. Although my experience may be a tad limited as a student who's yet to do any professional work in architecture.