Which graphics card to buy?

[Sebastien Barre]

Hi

>Currently we have an Erazor X (nVidia GeForce)

SDR, DDR ?

>and an obsolete/retired
>GLoria XXL (3DLabs GMX2000).

I've got a PC SGI Visual 320 at work, and a GMX2000 at home. Do you find 
the GMX obsolete ? It's still alright, but definitely too expensive.

>The ErazorX gives amazing performance and
>we haven't found any conformance or stability problems with it.

Is the GeForce so good ? That would be a good news, I knew it was a killer 
game-card, but not as good as high-end OpenGL graphics card. There is a 
geometry engine in the GeForce, but I thought the one (or two MX ?) on the 
GMX was really good. Have a look at :

http://www-sop.inria.fr/caiman/personnel/Robert.Riviere/vtk/sphere-bench/res 
ults.php3?famille=W&flats=1&flat=1&strip=1&transp=1&wire=1&txt=1&txtp=1

The GMX seems much better at triangle strips. And it has more RAM (96).

>  The
>GLoria XXL, though it was a 'professional' card, often crashed when
>we used it for texture-mapped volume rendering.

What kind of crashes ? Blue screen ? Computer hanging ?

>Though professional
>cards are supposed to have higher-quality drivers, the drivers for
>consumer-level cards get much greater testing for stability because
>they are aimed for such a huge market.

True, but as they are targeted to games, they often implement only a subset 
of OpenGL. A really good ICD is hard to find.

>My advice is to go for the the GLoria II unless you need dual-head
>or stereo.

My advice too, unless you are going to manipulate hundreds of thousands 
polygons (> 100 K).

Anyway Dimitri, as soon as you get your card, feel free to send us your 
benchmark results :
http://www.hds.utc.fr/~barre/vtk/sphere-bench.html

Thanks


--
Sebastien BARRE
IRCOM-SIC, UMR-CNRS 6615 - Université de Poitiers
Bât. SP2MI, Bvd 3 - Téléport 2, BP 179 F-86960 Futuroscope Cedex
Tel. : +33 (0)5 49 49 65 95 / 65 83, Fax : +33 (0)5 49 49 65 70
http://www-sic.univ-poitiers.fr/barre/ ou  http://www.hds.utc.fr/~barre/
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