Which graphics card to buy?

[Sebastien Barre]

At 10:59 30/03/00 -0500, David Gobbi a écrit:
>
> > 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.

Jesus, I've missed something there. The data we've been submitted reflect 
the opposite, the 320 being 3 times faster than a GeForce :
http://www-sop.inria.fr/caiman/personnel/Robert.Riviere/vtk/sphere-bench/res 
ults.php3?famille=W&flats=1&strip=1&txt=1&txtp=1

I know our benchmark does not reflect any real-word exemple at all, but the 
difference is huge. I would be very nice if you could bench your Erazor X 
and submit us your results :)

> > 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.

OK, I guess I might know where the problem is, because I've been fighting 2 
months to solve it when I bought the GMX 2000 (the whole system was hanging 
most of the time). This beast has a *huge* power consumption (I do remember 
that the board itself is *big*, there are 3 CPU on it, and 2 fans), 
therefore it was draining the energy from the CPU. Thus, the CPU slowed 
down, until it hung. Of course, underclocking my system to 200 Mhz instead 
of 333 Mhz was a solution (and it worked), but no one could be satisfied 
from that kind of workaround. So I had to buy a new (more powerful) 
motherboard :(

> > 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...

Yes, that's what I meant.

>this
>is true, I have run into problems with glDrawPixels() not being
>accelerated on many cards.

And I've heard that some cards can not use both accelerated and 
non-accelerated features, they drop to "everything non-accelerated". Hope 
it's a legend.

>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 ;-)

True, sorry, my app is very geometriy-centric :))
Feel free to develop something new in Python or Tcl or extend it.

--
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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