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

[Dave Reed]

On Friday 07 March 2003 04:26, Charl P. Botha wrote:

<snip>
 
> 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.


I suspect these are fixed in XFree 4.3. I can across some triangle
rendering issues when using triangle strips in Mesa 3.4 (which the
XFree 4.2 code was using). I contacted Brian Paul with a VTK example,
and he and Keith got this fixed in Mesa 4.0.1, but the Mesa 4.x code is 
so
different it wasn't easy to port the fix back to Mesa 3.4 so they
never did. I believe XFree 4.3 uses Mesa 4.x (right now I can't find
where I read this so someone please correct me if I'm wrong) so these
problems should be gone.


> 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.


I haven't tried it so I'll believe this.


> 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.


Dave