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

[Dave Reed]

On Friday 07 March 2003 15:12, Charl P. Botha wrote:
> 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.


Sorry, somehow I managed to misread your e-mail and thought you were
using XFree 4.2. All the bugs I had noticed went away when I switched
to using Mesa 4.x (software rendering) so I've been patiently waiting
for XFree 4.3 to include Mesa 4.x with hardware support.

I hope you've reported these bugs (sounds like you have) so they will
get fixed.

Dave