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

[Charl P. Botha]

On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 03:03, Dave Reed wrote:
> On Thursday 06 March 2003 19:47, Elvis Chen wrote:
> > 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.

My 2c: If you're going to do serious VTK development under Linux and
the choice is between equivalent ATI and NVidia cards, choose NVidia. 
The ATI open source drivers are good for games, but are not quite there
yet otherwise.  With 4.3.0 on my Radeon 7500, I can consistently
reproduce two show-stopper bugs with multiple VTK renderwindows.  With
DRI CVS (i.e. 3D bleeding edge) and some prototype kernel driver work by
one of the developers, these two bugs don't manifest.  However, with the
DRI drivers, there are some irritating triangle rendering bugs that
often occur in my VTK applications.

It also seems that the ATI binary driver (available for Radeon 8500 and
above) is also not ready for primetime, judging by all reports on
dri-{devel,users}@lists.sourceforge.net and devel at xfree86.org.

The NVidia drivers on the other hand, in spite of being binary and
closed-source and evil ;) have been around for a very long time
(computer-wise).  Personally, I've been using them since September 2000
and although there have been rough patches, I can recommend them for
serious development work.

If you feel like hacking on open-source graphics drivers (I do a some of
this with my ATI), by all means get an ATI.  If, however, you plan on
doing Real Work(tm) with VTK under Linux, get an NVidia.

On Windows I really wouldn't know.

Good luck,
Charl

-- 
charl p. botha http://cpbotha.net/ http://visualisation.tudelft.nl/