[AG-TECH] Display Experiment: Different Video Cards

[Jason Leigh]

Ivan,
	Dave Pape has been evaluating graphics cards and ganging them on a single
PC as well.
Here is his latest email on successes/failures, please keep Dave in the loop
on your experiences:


FYI, I've been setting up a new PC for my Crayoland museum project and
have taken the opportunity to use it to test several different nVidia
cards.  This includes the new Synergy III (dual-channel Quadro2MXR), and
a brief attempt at running up to 4 PCI TNT2 cards along with the Synergy.
I'll be putting a full summary under my CAVE/Linux web page soon; for now
the Charts-n-Graphs page
(http://www.evl.uic.edu/pape/CAVE/linux/nVidia/charts.html) shows some
results from GLperf.

On the idea of multiple cards in one PC, it kind of works, but won't be
useful for us at the moment.  The big problem is that Performer 2.4 for
Linux won't work with multiple pipes (it prints a warning message that
pfMultipipe is not supported).  I'll ask on info-performer if this will
ever change.  Running plain OpenGL (i.e. crayoland) worked, but was flaky
- trying to use AGP & PCI cards together locked up the machine, using more
than 3 PCI cards crashed the X server.  With 3 PCI TNT2s I could get
decent frame rates (20-30 fps) at 640x480 resolution; so, _maybe_ 3
GeForce2MXs would do okay at 1024x768.  Again, full details on the web
page, RSN.

=============================================================
Jason Leigh, PhD
spiff at evl.uic.edu              Electronic Visualization Lab (M/C 154)
EVL Phone (312) 996-3002         University of Illinois at Chicago
EVL FAX   (312) 413-7585         851 S. Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff     Chicago, IL 60607-7053


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov]On
> Behalf Of Ivan R. Judson
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 10:45 PM
> To: Ag-Tech at Mcs. Gov
> Subject: [AG-TECH] Display Experiment: Different Video Cards
>
>
>
> Hey everyone,
>
> Just wanted to let you know I put out an order for the following cards:
>
> Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 MX CRT 32MB Dual Video PCI $145.00
> Asus AGP-V7100 GeForce2 MX     32MB Dual Video AGP $196.57
>
> The idea here is to have 4 heads, 2 on AGP, 2 on a single PCI slot.
>
> These are both reasonably modern chipsets.  At least the
> performance on the
> nVidia based cards seem to have been the best of the best lately.
>
> If this works, and tests go well, I'll report such to you all so you can
> consider swapping graphics cards.
>
> The incremental cost would be ~$500.00, which I think is a reasonable cost
> to upgrade the graphics on the display box.  If you strongly disagree or
> agree, please chime in -- it'd be a good data point.
>
> I will verify these cards work both under Windows 2000 and Linux.
>
> Stay tuned, more details to follow.
>
> --Ivan
>
> ---
> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~judson
> Futures Laboratory
> Argonne National Laboratory
>
>