video cards again

[dgavin]

OK, I have checked with Sager and nvidia and after being shuffeled around I have found that the quadro FX2500m with 512 mb only supports 8 lights. I am wondering if the dual card would support 16 or still just 8. I am trying to get through to the elevated tech support at this point to find out. It amazes me that many I talked to don;t know what I am talking about when I ask how many lights the video card supports in Open GL rendering. I am suspecting that the dual card will still only support 8 lights. So now I am wondering if another card would give me 12-16 lights.
THis would be for a notebook. I think the GeFOrce 7950 GTX might support more lights BUT info on this thread seemed to point to the quadro card for CAD operations. If the GeForce can do more lights I might go with a single one of them vs. the dual quadro. I am getting more confused about which way to go. I want more rendering speed (not raytracing) and more lights for on site presentations. Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks,

[RootFarm]

There is a notebook that supports dual video cards? Which one are you looking at?

[dgavin]

I am looking at a Sager that supports dual quadro FX 2500M with 512 MB.

[RootFarm]

Thanks. Wish I had known about them earlier.

[dgavin]

For those interested.....

Hello Dennis,
Thank you for waiting. Regardless if you are using a single or dual GPU in your laptop, both the FX2500M and the GeForce 7900GTX only has hardware lighting support for 8 lights.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
David
NVIDIA Customer Care

[Francois]

If you can fit a 3dLab card such as the Wild4 7210 in a Sager laptop (which, I beleive is built using desktop parts), you can get 32 lights
Francois

OK, I have checked with Sager and nvidia and after being shuffeled around I have found that the quadro FX2500m with 512 mb only supports 8 lights. I am wondering if the dual card would support 16 or still just 8. I am trying to get through to the elevated tech support at this point to find out. It amazes me that many I talked to don;t know what I am talking about when I ask how many lights the video card supports in Open GL rendering. I am suspecting that the dual card will still only support 8 lights. So now I am wondering if another card would give me 12-16 lights.
THis would be for a notebook. I think the GeFOrce 7950 GTX might support more lights BUT info on this thread seemed to point to the quadro card for CAD operations. If the GeForce can do more lights I might go with a single one of them vs. the dual quadro. I am getting more confused about which way to go. I want more rendering speed (not raytracing) and more lights for on site presentations. Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks,

[Francois]

Dennis,
Wildcat4 cards are AGP
3dLabs also make Wildcat Realizm, PCIe, 32 lights....
Francois

OK, I have checked with Sager and nvidia and after being shuffeled around I have found that the quadro FX2500m with 512 mb only supports 8 lights. I am wondering if the dual card would support 16 or still just 8. I am trying to get through to the elevated tech support at this point to find out. It amazes me that many I talked to don;t know what I am talking about when I ask how many lights the video card supports in Open GL rendering. I am suspecting that the dual card will still only support 8 lights. So now I am wondering if another card would give me 12-16 lights.
THis would be for a notebook. I think the GeFOrce 7950 GTX might support more lights BUT info on this thread seemed to point to the quadro card for CAD operations. If the GeForce can do more lights I might go with a single one of them vs. the dual quadro. I am getting more confused about which way to go. I want more rendering speed (not raytracing) and more lights for on site presentations. Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks,

[dgavin]

Francois,

Thaks for the reply. I'll have to call Sager and see if they offer the card.
I also need 512 mb ram for processing textures. I'll report back if I find anything more.

[m dalton]

Don't mess with 3Dlabs cards... they were bought out by Creative and have discontinued workstation cards.

They also are not offering any more support or drivers for any future OS releases.

I had a Wildcat VP990 Pro and thought it was the best card I have ever owned, but thanks to creative they ruined a good thing.

Now I have a pair of nVidia 7900GTX'S and to be honest not impressed at all!

[dgavin]

M,


Thanks for the inout. If I cannot find a card that will give me more than 8 lights I will probably get the dual quadro FX 2500M cards with 512 ram. What are the specs on the dual nvidia 7900 cards you have? I am concerned that you are not impressed with the dual cards. CAn you expand a little on that?

Thanks,

[m dalton]

Well... to start with they should be faster than my old 3Dlabs card since it only supported direct X version 8, but I can't see any difference.

I think a lot of it is with Chief Architect and the way it is written. Even though Chief supports OpenGL, I'm not convinced they write their software to take full advantage of OpenGL hardware acceleration. Maybe this is why we do not see a lot of differences in benchmarks at the berryvale site.

I have built a lot work stations and did a bunch of personal testing (because I think the berryvale benchmarks are not reliable due to individual input) and can not see a huge difference from an AMD Athlon XP2600+ and my current dual Opteron's running at 3 GHz with 4 gigs of dual channel memory in a NUMA enviroment.

I'm pretty sure if I was to build a Personal Super Computer using cluster technology Chief would not or could not perform any faster .

The only advantage I have seen with with multiple video cards is the ability to run two or more monitors without any hicups.

[George Godwin]

I am not very knowledgable on the subject of video cards but Dennis mentioned needing 512 mb for processing textures. I recently began using an ATI X1600 series card via PCI Express with 512 mb DDR2 memory and it seems to me that the render camera is as fast as the vector camera. Maybe it's the 512 mb ram on board speeding up the processing of textures. The core and memory clocks are 500mhz and 405mhz respectively. The Future Shop gurus told me that the ATI X1600 with 512 mb was as good as or better than the top nVidia card for Chief at the time and said the 512 mb DDR2 memory was the key along with the fast processor on board. On their advice, I swapped an nVidia 7300 series card which was not as fast in my opinion for the ATI X1600. I do have an nVidia card with 256 mb in my year and a half old Dell 9300 laptop that I find to be quite fast as well but not as fast as the 512 mb ATI card. The comments that high end gaming cards do not have the 'gaming bang' with software like Chief was mentioned by the Future Shop gurus whom I have known for about 4 years.

[m dalton]

George,
The card I had before the 7900GTX 512mb (each) was an ATI FireGL v7350 with 1gig of GDDR3 memory.

I sold it on eBay, I was not impressed with it either!

It didn't do any better at rendering than the 7900 GTX's and had some driver issues regarding tool Tips.

[George Godwin]

Michael,
You have a lot more knowledge and experience with these cards and my input is only based on my limited personal experience. However, I do respect the advice of the local Future Shop gurus, one of whom has impressed me a lot over the years and is the current computer department manager. They told me that I would not get any better performance from the best nVidia card for gaming at the time compared to the ATI X1600. My only point is that I am not having any problems with the ATI X1600 512 mb compared to my past cards and it is quite noticeably faster.

[lbuttery]

What about the quadro cards that are designed for cad ?

I have heard many times that a gaming card may not help when doing CAD ?

Lew