[vtkusers] Sun Blade 100 vs. Ultra 10

[David Gobbi]

On Fri, 11 May 2001, Charl P. Botha wrote:

> For interest's sake, why aren't you buying cheap PCs with NVidia graphics
> cards?  They seem to be VERY cost-effective workstations...

The nVidia graphics cards are not very good for rendering detailed
geometry, which is what most people use VTK for.  From what I've seen,
the SGI Cobalt & the Sun Elite graphics beat nVidia hands down when
hundreds of thousands of polygons are involved.
And, as Miguel pointed out, just because it is a Sun doesn't mean it's
overly expensive - nVidia Quadro II card's aren't cheap, either.

We use nVidia cards almost exclusively, because 90% of our rendering is
done via textures.  I don't think that this is typical of most VTK users.

 - David

> On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 12:34:42PM +0200, Miguel Angel Martin Fernandez wrote:
> > 	we're buying some workstations to perform mainly computer graphics
> > (VTK) and image analysis. We are doubting between two SUN workstations:
> >
> > 	* Sun Blade 100 with 3*256 MB RAM and Expert 3D Lite graphics
> > card.
> > 	* Sun Ultra 10 with 2*256 MB RAM and Elite 3D m6 graphics card.
>
>