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

[Charl P. Botha]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 02:51:28PM -0500, Dave Reed wrote:
> On Friday 07 March 2003 04:26, Charl P. Botha wrote:
> > 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.

As I say in my mail above: the rendering bugs occur in current DRI CVS.  I
know that they're fixed in 4.3, but then 4.3 has those other show-stopper
bugs I mention.  Either way, there are serious problems with the open source
drivers that, in the presence of high-quality binary drivers for NVidia
cards, make the NVidia choice more prudent for people who are
interested in focusing on VTK work.

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