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<TITLE>RE: [AG-TECH] Best Video card for VIC</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>I think that buying a 3dlabs card for your ag display machine would most likely be unnecessary and much too expensive...in fact, unless you are running 3D rendering applications on your display machine, you do not need the 3d acceleration features that cards like the FireGL and Wildcat offer. For access grid display use, multi-headed 2D cards are all that is needed. AGP bandwidth should not be a problem either. I'm not sure, but I have heard that high performance 3D cards sacrifice 2D performance (for cost-efficiency, etc.).</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Steven Coorpender</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Systems Analyst</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>LSU Eye Center</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>-----Original Message-----</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>From: Douglas Baggett [<A HREF="mailto:dbaggett@nsf.gov">mailto:dbaggett@nsf.gov</A>] </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 8:40 AM</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>To: 'ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov'</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>Subject: [AG-TECH] Best Video card for VIC</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Recently we had a Grid meeting and due to the fact that there were too </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>many windows on the console screen, the video card could not handle it </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>(it was a NVIDIA FireGL card).</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Assuming the problem is bandwidth on the AGP bus (please correct me if I </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>am wrong), has anybody used some of the new AGP 8x cards like the </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>wildcat 4 from 3dlabs?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Administratively of course the correct solution is to request sites to </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>limit the number of cameras used when joining an event. The problem was </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>that during this meeting we had many ad-hoc sites.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>thanks!</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>-Doug Baggett</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>CISE/NSF/OAD</FONT>
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