[AG-TECH] Display Machine/Video Cards

[Christoph Willing]

Jonathan,

We've been testing a PNY brand Quadro4 550-XGL (dual vga output from AGP
slot) card together with 2x HIS brand Riva TNT M64 (single output PCI)
cards in our AG display machine.

We're looking at this setup as a way to do AG collaborations involving
3D applications (and utilising hardware OGL). It works great so far -
its amazing to see the Performer town demo running across two panels of
an access grid.

The main gotcha was that the Quadro card wouldn't work in our orginal
display machine - I think it was to do with the age and/or AGP
implementation on the motherboard. Therefore the successful testing was
actually done with a Tyan S2466 mobo with dual Athlon 1800+ cpus. We
also have external confirmation that it works with a Soltek (85DRV4?)
and P4 2.26GHz cpu and we'll start testing that setup in an AG context
ourselves today.

The second gotcha is that the hardware OGL only works on the primary
video device of a Xinerama setup (we use Linux for the display machine
here and Xinerama is method to spread a single desktop across multiple
vga cards). In our case we have the dual output Quadro as the primary
device, which means we have hardware OGL on 2 of the 4 video displays.
Its not perfect, but its a huge leap from the various Matrox boards
we've tried previously (G200/400/450/550).

The new Matrox Parhelia is also a possibility in this area. However I've
seen a comparison review which claimed the 3D performance (both OGL and
DirectX) is still not as good as an Nvidia GF4 Ti4600. Maybe they will
improve as the drivers are further developed. Also, more importantly, no
Linux drivers at all yet.

Regards,
chris


On Thu, 2002-08-01 at 08:22, Jonathan C. Humfrey wrote:
> 
> Has anyone installed a rack mount dual Xeon processor machine as the
> display machine?
> 
> Has anyone used Nividia video cards rather than the Matrox?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jonathan Humfrey

-- 
Chris Willing                      Telephone   (61-2) 9351 3005
VisLab, A28                        Facsimile   (61-2) 9351 1880
University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia                http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au