Quadro K1200 upgrade

[Dalton Watts]

I'm mostly interested in 3ds max smooth viewport/high FPS. What graphics card would you recommend? Should I stay in the Quadro line like M4000/P4000 or should I buy the GTX 1070/1080?

[Bzuco]

First check if gpu usage during work in viewport is 100% and gpu frequency is at maximum. You can use gpuz utility. Many time is CPU bottleneck...it depends also if your models modifier stack is collapsed or not, if you are using proxies in viewport or full mesh models. Also check if all objects have backface culling disabled in obj. properties.
If you have all nitrous engine features on with scene lights and transparency ON, then go and buy 1070/1080. But I think 1060 will be also good option. How big are your scenes (interiors/exteriors)? What FPS is good for you?

Here is good table with all nvidia GPUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
You can compare graphics cards according single precision column.

[Dalton Watts]

Thanks, Bzuco! CPU's aren't a bottleneck in my case. I have 2x Xeons 2699 v3's.

Managing the scenes accordingly eliminates the need for a new GPU for now. I've also been using a lot more proxies in most of my recent projects and that helps a lot. GPU usage rarely hits 70-80%.

[Bzuco]

3dsmax utilize only one core during work in viewport, so CPU will be allways bottleneck. Maximum turbo core frequency is important and your xeons have it 3.6GHz. It is not bad, but when you look at 4 or 6 core intel CPUs on market, they have turbo core frekv. 4.3 - 4.7GHz, which is better for fps.
Anyway, if you set percentage of pointcloud on all corona proxy objects from default 15% to only 1%, you will see another significant improvement in fps. The down side is, that proxy objects does not look attractive in viewport :))