Recommended Video Card

[T. 'Nifty New Hat' Mitchell]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 09:21:44PM -0700, Aaron Cirilo wrote:
> 
> i can recommend you "don't" use Nvidia :)
> 
> On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 edwarner99 at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> > What "cheap" video card would someone recommend for 3D rendering.

Perhaps the best place to research 3D rendering in the context of 
open source is the dri project pages.

   http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/dri/

There is a hardware list to scan here:
   http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/CategoryHardware

Good benchmarks that apply in this context are hard to get
and harder to understand.

I happen to be typing this on FC1 with an nVidia card and the closed
source driver.  "glxgears" chugs along at 500+ frames per second.  On
my tinkerbox running FC2 I get about 100FPS with the opensource
drivers.  I will get more FPS when the 4K stack thing is behind us and
nVidia hooks into FC2 and the 4K stack parade.  Not bad for a sub $50
card.

2D graphics FLYS on both!  Some 2D is faster on the opensource box
but the hardware is not exactly equal. see x11perf

Do tell us more about what API is involved for rendering in your
question.  Most of the buzz is about OpenGL but not all.  I have been
told that some 2D/3D APIs are not public and can only be had closed
source.

And, then some folk consider 3D rendering to be a compute task that
does not involve the screen.  Folks like ILM, Pixar, do not get to see
the full expression of what they are doing real time at full
resolution.  A massive render farm works 24x7 for a year generating
the bits we see...   So, if that is what you are thinking then I just
addressed the wrong topic.



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