[vtkusers] Re: Best video card for VTK?

[Dave Reed]

On Thursday 06 March 2003 10:53, Steve Boyd wrote:
> Hello all, 
> 
> In buying a new computer for VTK-based visualizations, I've been given 
a
> choice between the following two video cards:
> 
> 1. ATI Radeon 9000 pro w/128mb
> 2. GeForce 4 Ti4200 w/128MB
> 
> In general, is there a criteria that I should use to select an
> appropriate card?  Or, does it really matter as long as a "high-end"
> card is chosen?


It probably doesn't matter that much. It appears that VTK is not
particularly optimized in the way it sends geometry through the
graphics pipeline. I believe someone from kitware indicated VTK does
not optimized the way it makes OpenGL calls so don't expect anywhere
near "peak peformance" from the video card when using VTK.

From the little I've read, it appears that the latest ATI cards are
better than NVidia's. Apparently NVidia's latest chip has had some
delays. 

If you're using Linux, I'd definitely go with ATI since open source
drivers exists for their ATI 8500 (as of XFree 4.3) and below and they
release their specs to developers so hopefully eventually open source
drivers will exist for their current cards. ATI also started releasing
Linux binary drivers for all their cards so you can hardware
acceleration right now with their drivers.

If you skim the archives you'll see a number of issues with various
versions of NVidia's binary Linux drivers. Nobody but NVidia can fix
them because they're binary only.

I believe the ATI 9700 Pro has significantly better performance than
the ATI 9000 Pro so I'd see if that's a possibility.

If you're using Windows, it's probably a toss up, but I don't know
since I don't use Windows.

HTH,
Dave