Martin Spott writes: > Can anyone tell me what's the big deal about the nVidia boards ? > I know, they're pretty fast, but to what extent is this useful - at least > for FlightGear. I have a simple ATI Radeon at my workplace with a PIII/600 > and this gives me about 40 fps. Do I really need more to be happy with > FlightGear ?
If you are happy, there's no point in changing cards. :-) My previous card was a Voodoo-3 ... this was a 16 bit card, 16 bit textures, 16 bit depth buffer, etc. At the time the mesa based linux drivers had some bugs which led to annoying visual artifacts, and jumpy/jerky motion. So when I got my first GeForce card I suddenly had 24/32 bit textures, RGBA textures had a full 8 bits per channel (rather than the 4444 of the voodoo card.) Clouds didn't have banding anymore. The 24 bit depth buffer makes a huge difference with rendering mountains in the distances as well as cloud intersections with terrain. The nvidia drivers rendered correctly and didn't have the visual anomalies of the voodoo3, and my problem with jumpy/jerky motion went away. Plus the whole card ran faster. Because of this, I'm a big fan of nvidia despite their closed source drivers. In my opinion, they are the first company to do 3d right on linux, good performance, good rendering quality, good stability. They are putting out a quality product at a reasonable price. If your ATI card has similar specs and performance to the nvidia, and the drivers work equally well, then that is great. I see no reason to switch, and I'm glad to see that nvidia finally has a bit of competition. And if someone wanted to buy me the latest greatest ATI card, I'd be more than happy to try it out and return with a more informed opinion. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
