Graphics card question

General Moho topics.

Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger

Post Reply
taftdavidhaynes
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Feb 05, 2015 5:11 am

Graphics card question

Post by taftdavidhaynes »

I am working with anime studio pro 9.6 What graphics card works best with this software?
User avatar
Greenlaw
Posts: 9192
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:45 pm
Location: Los Angeles
Contact:

Re: Graphics card question

Post by Greenlaw »

In general, I think pretty much any modern graphics card will be fine for ASP/Moho. I have a workstation with a beefy graphics card now but back when I did my early ASP stuff (Scareplane, HLF,) I was using a fairly low-powered laptop with a modest graphics chipset, and I found the performance was acceptable. If anything, I could have used more RAM in that laptop than a faster graphics card.

That said, depending on how you intend to work with Moho, you may want a good GPU and plenty of VRAM. If I understand correctly, Moho mainly uses the graphics card to internally convert vector art to bitmap to speed up UI and display performance. Naturally, the more memory you have in the card, the better because this will allow for more and larger layers to be converted.

The downside is that Moho's display doesn't handle nested masking effects properly when using the GPU, so it's not especially useful if you use a lot of masking techniques in your characters. Because of this, I always disable GPU acceleration in Moho. (Even then, the masking display is not perfect but it's more usable.) So, in my case, having a fairly beefy graphics card hasn't been especially helpful for Moho. Disabling the GPU in Moho hasn't hurt animation performance for me, and I tend to build complex rigs with over a hundred Smartbone actions. Note that I'm talking ONLY about display performance. The masking does render correctly, with or without GPU acelleration.

Also, be aware that Moho does not use the GPU at all for rendering. Moho uses only the CPU for rendering, so having a faster CPU and more RAM is probably more important for Moho than a more powerful graphics card.

On the other hand, I use other animation and compositing programs with Moho that make better use of my card's GPU (After Effects with Trapcode plugins, for example,) so the card is not being wasted. So if you're shopping for a graphics card, don't buy it for Moho, buy it for other production tools you might use along with Moho.

Final note: In the above, I'm describing performance with a graphics card only for ASP 9.5 to Moho 12. The developers have previously mentioned that they are looking into display performance improvements, and the implication is that a future version of Moho may make better use of the graphics card. So if you do get a decent graphics card now, you might have the motivation to upgrade your current ASP later on.
Post Reply