[vtkusers] video card

[Volpe, Christopher R (CRD)]

> I am currently thinking of :
> 
> ASUS V7700 GeForce2 GTS 32MB DDR AGP Deluxe TV-Out)
> OR
> 3DLabs OxygenGVX1
> OR
> ELSA GLoria II
> 
> Never bought a good video card before, so could someone advise as to:
> Is price between them justified (anti-aliasing would be nice?)
> Any better suggestions for my setup?

We did some tests not too long ago, but we were restricting ourselves to dual-output cards (real dual
output, with different contents per screen, not just the same content on two screens, since we're
driving an HMD in stereo). The Oxygen GVX210, at around $1500 (if I recall correctly), running in a
machine with dual 833 MHz P/// Xeon CPUs and half a Gig of PC800 RDRAM  performed so miserably that
we assumed it had to be defective. (My year-old $200 GeForce-256 card running on a 650MHz Athlon
whipped it easily by like a factor of 2.) They then sent us their GVX420 to test, which offerred
mediocre performance, which should be about the same as a properly-working 210 card (same core, just
more memory, and we don't do much texture-stuff here, so it didn't matter to us.) I'd kip the Oxygen
GVX210/420. And considering that the GVX210 is higher-end than the GVX1, I wouldn't have too much
confidence in the latter either. 

The $400 Elsa Synergy III was what we ended up choosing, which had dual output and better performance
than the Oxygen. We also tested an Elsa Gloria III (just for kicks, since it didn't have dual output,
and someone else on site happened to have one), and it blew everything else away. The nvidia quadro
pro GPU was just amazing. And I would expect that their latest, the Elsa Gloria DCC, based on the
nvidia quadro DCC (digital content creation), would be even better. 

Chris
> GE Corporate Research & Development 
>
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________
> 
Christopher R. Volpe
Computer Scientist
Visualization and Computer Vision Program / Electronic Systems Lab
Bldg KW, Room C215
P.O. Box 8, Schenectady, NY 12301

(518) 387-7766, Dial Comm: 8*833-7766, Fax: (518) 387-6981
e-mail: volpecr at crd.ge.com    web: http://www.crd.ge.com/~volpecr