I've had good overall experience with nVidia cards ranging from gaming cards to higher-end workstation cards on a variety of different systems.
While some may claim better price/performance from ATI, I can't recommend them. I've had uniformly poor experience with their lack of customer support, poor quality drivers and documentation as well as clumsy installation scripts.
As to whether you need a high-end gaming card vs. a low-end workstation card, that will really depend on how much geometry you throw at the card as well as the characteristics of your system. Certainly an older system can leverage a newer graphics card, but there will be limits because of processor speed, bandwidth, etc. In that case, even a reasonably new gaming card will be relatively inexpensive and should have significantly improve things for you.
I've not used stereo capabilities with any of these cards.
| Steve Cousins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/18/2004 04:52 PM
|
To: [email protected] cc: Subject: [opendx-users] Good graphics card for OpenDX with i386 Linux? |
I currently have a 4 year old Leadtek GeForce card that does OK with
OpenDX but if I change the Opacity in Colormap Editor it slows to a
crawl. Also the rendering quality seems to be poor compared to the
software OpenGL.
I'm wondering what people are having success with as far as graphics
cards and OpenDX on PC's with Linux. I've taken a look and it seems
that there are a couple of different tiers of cards. There are the
cheaper cards (~$100 - $200) that seem to be for games primarily, and
then there are cards like the FireGL cards which seem to be more geared
towards strictly OpenGL acceleration. These (along with the nVidia
QUADRO FX series) start at around $600.
Is it worth it to spend the extra money or will the cheaper cards
(lightyears ahead of my GeForce card I'm sure) be able to handle such
things as reduced Opacity? I'm interested in hearing what people are
actually using with good results. I would like to have the ability to
do stereo viewing so if you have recommendations on equipment for that
too I'd be very interested.
Thanks very much,
Steve
--
______________________________________________________________________
Steve Cousins, Ocean Modeling Group Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Marine Sciences, 208 Libby Hall http://rocky.umeoce.maine.edu
Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469 Phone: (207) 581-4302
