Re: Rendering / 3DS Max

Essentially, it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. As Aaron said, if you're looking for single-frame rendering (either as a true single-frame render, or as a frame in a sequence of animated shots), you'll see a bit better performance with the professional-grade cards that are built to crunch heavy numbers, especially as you get into ray-tracing and other ridiculously crazy rendering scenes. I had a single-frame image at 640x480 take my machine about 40 minutes to render because it had a light source refracting and ray-tracing through a glass with ice cubes on it.

Additionally, if you're looking for game-engine performance, then you'll be better off with a high end 'gamer' card. Plus, the highest-end gamer card you can buy is still going to be under $1000, whereas the professional-grade cards are thousands of dollars. I don't think you'll see the increase in render times as a significant benefit given the dollars involved.. unless you're rendering animated sequences / movies. I've seen a difference of an hour-plus between a commercial rendering card and my 6800gt on a simple 3 second render (90 frames). So, if you were going to render out a short movie or even a long movie at medium-to-high resolution.. you might see a big enough difference to make it worth your while, but I guess it comes back to what you need it to do for you.. and if time is critical.