August 03, 2012, 10:56:27 am
The architecture for the 460's are three plus years old now. The 480 still packs a good bit of punch compared to a number of 500 series, because its an x80 version with more cores.
As price does not matter then:
1. go for the most recent GTX the 680, there's a new release now with 4GB VRAM by some makers, so it gives you best performance with most available VRAM for Lumion.
2. the 690 is dual and not really any use for Lumion, just for gaming.
3. from the 680 work your way down the performance list (see videobenchmarking site mentioned in FAQ and Arthur's link).
4. the 670 closely matches the 680 due to the 680 issues with power and so although it has more cores, its clock speeds and bus data transfer aren't really anything better than the 670. So the 670 has better price performance and also now includes a 4GB version from suppliers such as Palit.
5. I see from the most recent update of benchmarks that the 670 is now placed just ahead of the 680, so although it's probably the result of changing benchmarking measures, its then the diff in price that's worth looking at.
6. the Radeon 7970 is up there with the top ones, and price in the market for Radeon has been a bit less than for the GTX. Visual quality is supposed to be a little better with the Radeon, but they don't implement the same standards as NVIDIA, so Lumion is said to be better to work with on NVIDIA.
7. if you're looking at laptops, that's another and quite different story, but has changed recently with the introduction of the GTX680M which now matches or surpases the Radeon in performance but may still be more pricey. Seems the Radeon 7970M has almost equivalent performance as its workstation sister. Most laptop GPU's have half or less performance than their counterpart workstation all due to power consumption issues so something for example like a 580M is nothing like a 580, rather it's more like a 460 or maybe 520.
So overall, consider what its to be used for requirements, review the benchmarking web sites such as videobenchmark.com AND others. Find the best performing with best VRAM and consider standards and quality of manufacturer and support, then compare against prices.
HTH
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