Hi Chris,
we are using on our helicopter flight simulator build with osg 2.9.11
the ATI Radeon HD5870 withh ATI Eyefinity 6 with 1 Go of DDR5 under
Windows 7. I agree with J-S on the fact that the drivers are much more
stable than before in concern of OpenGL. However the ATI Catalyst
drivers are still heavy and some upgrades make the application crash due
to incomplete or incorrect implementation of OpenGL 3. Many bug-fixes
have been made by AMD/ATI but some problems still remain.
Let's say that once you have found a stable driver version, you should
keep it as long as possible and only upgrade if you need some new
functionalities.
In our case we took the ATI card for the Eyefinity technology (6 screens
on the same card, and the possibility to rule up to 4 cards in a PC).
I don't know the quality of ATI drivers under Linux (I don't neither
know which platform you want to use...), maybe some other people may be
of any help for the Linux side.
Cheers,
Christian
Le 05/04/2011 20:07, Jean-Sébastien Guay a écrit :
Hi Chris,
I'm projecting to get a new development system in the next year or
so, which means about
6 months of planning before I buy something.
Wow, you're a very cautious consumer! :-)
I've been on Nvidia for the last few years, and have been mostly
happy with the driver
support, but I'm looking toward ATI/AMD again because NVidia's OpenCL
64-bit FPU
performance is allegedly crippled in their latest consumer hardware,
putting it in a
severe disadvantage against rival parts from AMD:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/6
It may be useful to note that the GTX 480 and 470 are not the most
recent generation of GPUs from nVidia, there are now the 5xx series.
So the information in the above link may be outdated. Maybe it still
applies, but it's worth checking out.
The other thing is if it's only slower for that particular feature, I
wouldn't call that a severe disadvantage. It all depends on what
you'll be doing with it. I have a GTX 470 at home, and it's very fast
(at least compared to my GTX 260 at work, it's much faster).
My main concern with AMD/ATI is the poor quality of drivers I've
experienced in past
years. I run Win7/64 right now. Can anyone weigh in on the recent
quality of these drivers?
I haven't directly used ATI cards lately. I have heard they've become
much better, but still lagging behind nVidia, mostly with respect to
OpenGL driver stability and performance. Perhaps someone here has used
recent-generation and comparable cards from both and can better answer
- that's pretty much the only way you'll be able to get that information.
Hope this helps,
J-S
_______________________________________________
osg-users mailing list
osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org
http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
