Which graphics card to buy?

[David Gobbi]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Sebastien Barre wrote:

> Hi
> 
> >Currently we have an Erazor X (nVidia GeForce)
> 
> SDR, DDR ?

SRD (the X^2 is DDR -- nice logical progression)
 
> >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.

Almost everything we do involves texture mapping.  Even a year ago, you
could get a $300 consumer card that had faster texturing than the GMX2000,
and some of those comsumer cards (from nVidia and particularly Matrox)
have very high-quality texture mapping.  
So: for our particular applications (which are similar to Dimitris')
the GMX2000 has been obsolete for about a year.

> >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 Erazor X only seems to have about 1/4 the geometry speed of our 
SGI 320, but that might be a result of the drivers.  The Quadro should
be much better.  The Erazor X (and Quadra) have easily 4X the texture
speed of the 320, so it is a much better choice for texture-accelerated
volume rendering.

> >  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 ?

Computer hanging.  Anytime we tried about 24MB of textures (which is
a pretty small volume) it was even odds whether the computer would
hang.  Could have been ELSA's fault, not 3DLabs.  Even my old
Matrox G200 could handle similar sized texture volumes with no
trouble... and it had to do nearly all the texturing across the
AGP bus.

> >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.

Even the drivers for game cards implement all of OpenGL nowadays.  You
might mean that not all OpenGL features are hardware accelerated... this
is true, I have run into problems with glDrawPixels() not being
accelerated on many cards.  

> >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

I'll have to develop a new sphere-bench test that properly stresses
the texture fill rate on the cards, your sphere-bench is very
geometry-centric ;-)

- David

--------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the private VTK discussion list. Please keep messages on-topic.
Check the FAQ at: <http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/vtkfaq>
To UNSUBSCRIBE, send message body containing "unsubscribe vtkusers" to
<majordomo at public.kitware.com>. For help, send message body containing
"info vtkusers" to the same address.
--------------------------------------------------------------------