Hi, I was wondering what to look for in good graphics cards for work in maya (fluid sims, physics etc) and mudbox? How important is vram?

I'm looking at an nvidia 965m 2gb vram currently. Main memory I'll probably go for 16gb although I can easily upgrade that.

well i personally wouldnt consider a card with less that 4GB. if you are going to render complicated scenes i would recommend 32GB of system RAM.

I am using a GTX 970 4GB Phanton and dont have any issues. I also have 32GB of system ram which i upgraded a while ago as i was not able to render a complicated scene in 4k

hope that helps

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Custom built W10 Pro 64 bit, Hazwell Intel 5820, Asus X99 MOBO, 32 GB DDR4 Ram, EVGA nVidia GTX1080 Founders Edition, 512GB SSD Primary HDD, 16TB Storage, 27" Samsung 4k Display. Wacom 27QHD, Oculus Rift CV1

To be honest, the video card doesn't really matter all too much. The only thing it's used for is the viewport and the interface. All other calculations are done on the CPU, not the GPU. 2 GB of VRAM should be a decent amount. But in reality, it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to have a lot of individual objects in your viewport, than yes, more VRAM would be useful. If you spend most of your time in the render view, then it becomes less of a bottleneck. 16 GB of RAM is good for most things. (A lot of studio workstations have this as default, and go up if it's a dynamics or lighting workstation)

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.