[vtkusers] Re: Re: Best video card for VTK?

[Dave Reed]

On Thursday 06 March 2003 19:47, Elvis Chen wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 18:30, Dave Reed wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 
> correct me if I'm wrong, but the open source driver, as embedded in
> XFree, does NOT have 3D hardware acceleration at all.  It is primarily 
a
> 2D driver.  3D calculation will be performed using MESA (software)
> instead.


You're mistaken.

XFree 4.2 provides 3D hardware acceleration for the ATI Radeon 7500
and software rendering for the Radeon 8500. XFree 4.3 (just released
about a week ago) provides hardware acceleration for the 8500 also.


> If you are developing under linux, and does not mind closed-source
> driver, go with nvidia.  Their (closed-source) OpenGL driver is pretty
> muture.  ATI also just released their own (closed-source) driver.  BUT
> 1) it is buggy, and 2) doesn't work with OEM (Powered-by ATI) ATI 
cards.


I briefly tried ATI's binary driver with the ATI 8500, but went back
to XFree's so I could use the tv tuner so I can't comment on the
stability. I do know that recent NVidia drivers also had issues
(search this mailing list and you'll see references to them). Your
issue #2 was true originally, but ATI released an updated driver that
also works with Powered-by ATI cards.

See:
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-linux.html


> If you are developing under windows, and wants the fastest video card
> that money can buy, ATI 9700pro (and 9800pro if you can wait) is your
> best bet.  These two cards will outperform any current nvidia video
> cards.
> 
> If you do volume-rendering, take ATI over nvidia for its memory
> bandwidth.  If you have very large surface meshes, nvidia FX is 
probably
> better.  nvidia has some toolkit (and opengl extension) that may aid 
in
> volume rendering as well.

Dave