Anyone Maya 5 or 6 users???

[Jenix]

I haven't installed Maya on my system yet,

but I know there's many parhelia users surffering from crashes with Maya 5 or later..

I looked up the matrox forum in order to avoid those problems before I install Maya

but only to fail...

Whenever P users ask matrox about solutions,

matrox said 'try the driver for Maya 4.5..' only..

What is worse, matrox also says 'driver for 4.5' won't work well in 5 or later..

See what I quote from matrox's response below..

'Well All I can tell you is if I go by what is stated on our website it looks like we are only supporting Maya 4.0 and 4.5 which is why you have not seen any new drivers for Maya since then and from what I understand the new general drivers do not work properly either with Maya '


Should I install Maya 6 or what???

Go back to 4.5 and give up other new features??

or give up Maya and use 3D Max???


Any tips, any ideas are welcome..

[UtwigMU]

I'm using drivers for Maya 4.5 (see my forum post on Matrox tech support forum) and they appear to work fine - I created a cloth to collide with glossy ball on a checkered floor and rendered the scene (nothing special) and I saw no crashes in Maya 6.0.

I dualboot my system (2x XP, will soon probably add SuSE Linux 9.2 as a boot option) and I use one boot for games and other for work. On gaming partition I use lattest web drivers and they work fine with games I play (IL2 Sturmovik, Enemy Territory, Half Life 2).

The 1.08.0133 drivers cause a crash in Maya 6.0 when opening hypershade.

EDIT: Also the 1.06 drivers for Maya 4.5 are old enough to still be supported by Matrox Tech Support Tweak Utility.

[Jenix]

Wow~ so quick~^^

Thank you for response..

You are using Maya 6.0 with the driver for 4.5 and no problem..hmm..


I finally decided to get one more VGA for 3D..

I'm planning to buy 'QuadroFX 540 PCI-E 128MB'

and install in my system together with Parhelia..

Parhelia for 2D, Quadro for 3D.. What do you think??

Using two video cards simultaneously won't cause a crash??



Ah, I want to ask you one more thing..

Do you think there's some difference between AGP 4x and 8x

for work in Maya or some other 3D modeling softwares??

(I'm sorry I'm asking about 8x over and over again.. but I want to make sure....

This may be my final question on 8x..)

[UtwigMU]

I think what you are planning is impossible as there is no motherboard supporting P4 EE CPU, AGP videocard and PCI Express videocard at the same time.

Your options are:
A 2 cards:
- AGP 3D card + PCI Parhelia (the PCI Parhelia is PCI 64/66MHz which is comparable to AGP2x speed and should work similarly as 8x if you have 64-bit PCI slots) (you may also get P650 PCI which is only dualhead and half slower but as good in 2D)
- AGP Parhelia + PCI 3D card (tough luck finding a card that is better as FX5700 and R9000 are comparable to Parhelia in 3D)
- Getting PCIe motherboard with SLI and getting Parhelia APVe (this is new native PCIe core) and 3D card
B 1 card:
- ditch Parhelia, forget about tripplehead and get Quadro
- forget about newer games (HL2 is playable, Doom3 is not I don't know what's with Far Cry) and keep Parhelia and 3head


My speculation is that untill WGF2.0 (Windows graphic foundation 2.0 - above DX9) is finalized graphic makers (Ati, Matrox, nVidia, S3, XGI) will not release cards with newer features in terms of shaders... So I think we can't expect newer core from Matrox untill at least middle of 2006.

As for 8x vs 4x - 8x is 10-15% faster in 3D and should have better antialiasing for wireframes. That's it.


My personal plan is to replace Parhelia 4x with 8x at one point but this is low priority on my hardware upgrade list and keep Parhelia as main card in this box untill I upgrade this box (MPX, dual Athlons @ 2.26) to something compelling after Longhorn comes out and scene clears a bit (late 06 early 07).

When better 3D gaming becomes a priority (I survived with PII350@467 and G400 untill 2003) I'll build a separate gaming box (single AMD CPU, gaming card).

[Jenix]

Sorry for late response^^

I finally found one supports for both AGP 8x and PCI-E at the same time..

named Asrock 775Dual-915GL..

But unfortunately, it cannot support for Matrox's and the performance for AGP is very very low..

I hope there will be another model like this from somewhere someday..

[UtwigMU]

Don't get AGP+PCIe motherboard as they are generally low end, unstable hack jobs with inferior chipsets.