[vtkusers] nvidia GeForce/GeForce2 cards with RedHat 6.2and vtk

[John Shalf]

There seems to be a little confusion here.  The 320 VW and 540 VW are based on Cobalt which is
SGI's proprietary graphics technology.  The graphics is tightly coupled to the main memory
subsystem of the machine so you can do cool things like use 1Gig of RAM for texture memory.
The new SGI Visual Workstations (the 230 330 and 550) use an NVidia Quadro based graphics
board which is hosted on AGP4x.  SGI seems to have abandoned Cobalt which is a shame, but PC
graphics is very cost-sensitive.  So bandwidth between main memory and the board is actually a
bit lower on these new x30 based workstations than the x20's).

I have seen SGI 320's and 540's running Linux/OpenGL1.2 many times at graphics conferences.
In fact, SGI's release of performer for Linux pretty much requires OpenGL1.2.  Optimized
OpenGL1.2 for Linux *is* bundled with the new 230,330 and 550 workstations, but I've had a
difficult time figuring out how the hell you download implementation of OpenGL to run on the
older 320's and 540's.  The best info I can find is at
    http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/linux-faq.html#6
    http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/

Another guy here at NERSC (Wes Bethel) has been running XF86 4.0 with a GEForce board
(XF86_SVGA w/nv driver) and it rocks!  There are a few lock-ups here and there, but
performance is great... especially if you use vertex arrays (any plans for the VTK Renderer to
use vertex arrays soon)?

-john

Sebastien BARRE wrote:

> At 15:05 26/06/00 +0200, Carlos Manzanares a écrit:
>
> >The last week i went to the Linux/SGI meeting in Madrid and one of the
> >main topics was
> >visualization under Linux and their new visual workstations.
>
> That's a good news. I've got a Visual 320 NT, and I was still doubting I
> can install Linux on it (without crashing the whole stuff, or erasing this
> BIOS).
>
> >I got some information there that could be very useful: SGI is using in
> >their visual
> >workstations the chip nVIDIA GeForce
>
> That's very strange... I'm more than perplexed :)
>
> As you might know, Robert Riviere and I are maintaining a simple VTK 3D
> benchmarks and a database that holds the results for every configuration.
> http://www.hds.utc.fr/~barre/vtk/sphere-bench.html
> the results are here :
> http://www-sop.inria.fr/caiman/personnel/Robert.Riviere/vtk/sphere-bench/#re
> sults
>
> Some users have already tested the GeForce and the Visual 320 : the SGI
> computer is 3 to 4 times faster than the GeForce configuration (and the SGI
> 540 is actually ruling the test). I know that other pieces of the hardware
> are involved (RAM, bus and so on), but I guess that if I had a GeForce in
> my computer, I'd not get such good performances (but it's expensive also).
>
> Or maybe is the hardware done by Nvdia, but completely unrelated to the
> actual GeForce architecture. The Visual SGI computer does not have any
> "graphic card", the whole stuff mother-board + graphics chips + RAM + bus
> is a single unit.
>
> Or are you talking about future Visual workstations (I've haven't heard
> anything about them) ?
>
> Anyway, the GeForce / GeForce 2 is a great card, I'd definitely advise it
> if you are on budget.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
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