Graphics Card Recommendations - What do you use?

[Chris Lohman]

I am often asked for recommendations on graphics cards for use strictly with IronCAD. We unfortunately do not yet have an extensive test lab with all of the latest hardware so hopefully we can use these forums to help each other out.

 

Here are a few notes that I have on my card:

 

I am using a Dell Precision 420 workstation with a Matrox G400 MAX 32 bit card, using the dual head functionality. All of my hardware was provided by Dell. The Matrox G400 seems to be a solid low-mid range graphics card for IronCAD. I always run in full OpenGL. I do keep my scene rendering at Smooth Shading/Show Textures (default) but for no reason other than I rarely work with textures or have the need for photo quality rendering. I work for IronCAD and spend my day looking at your parts for the most part so I rarely find myself spending a few consecutive hours with IronCAD as a designer would. I just oull up the latest scene until I find a fix and then never look at it again. So your mileage will vary. For what I need it though this card is adequate. I do experience hesitations from time to time when performing camera operations, like rotating the scene, but I can't remember the last time I had to render-down into wireframe or box rendering just to rotate a part.

 

So for scenes with less than 100 parts, with a low edge/facet count, I can't complain.

 

I am running Windows 2000. I always use the latest drivers from Matrox (I never goto Dell for drivers because they almost never seem to have the absolute latest and greatest the day it releases). I do also have Directx8a installed and I always install every possible update when Microsoft releases. I have also run the Elsa Synergy II and have similar feelings toward it.

 

For some notes on graphics cards in general:

 

I have worked with many different people using many different cards. I have come to the following general conclusion; "CAD" cards, really do work better with IronCAD even though they have almost identical specs as a consumer card. What this means is this: You may be considering two card from the same manufacturer with almost identical hardware specs. They're both 32 meg cards, they have the exact same chips on them in the same quantities, they both claim to use the same instructions in a particular chip or whatever, you can find a difference except for the price. The one marketed to consumers is $1200, the one being marketed as a "CAD" card is $3600. Why not go for the lower price. I always thought it was just a marketing scam. Take the same card, give it a more impressive sounding name like MAX, or PRO, and more than double the price. I have learned after 4 years of reading reviews, talking to people, reading about hardware, and testing on my own, that there really is a difference. I have seen with my own eyes that the card marketed as a "CAD" card really does outperform the consumer card when running a CAD application and have heard many others say the same thing. Should this influence you one way or the other though? You have to also weigh the amount of work you'll be doing and whether or not you really have a need for that extra performance boost with that massive price tag.

 

 

[dsulli]

I use the Fire GL-2 graphics card and recommend it highly. I can rotate very large assemblies with ease and rendering/recalculating is very fast. The card cost $1200 during the beginning of this year. The price may have come down.

 

FYI: ATI now owns the Fire GL line, which was under Diamond and then S3.

[jloach]

I use Fire GL2 as well, in a P4 1.4GHz box with an Ultra 160 SCSI disk. Nice and fast - no problems. Windows 2000.

 

My previous system was a Fire GL1, in a dual P3 550 MHz with Ultra 80 drives. Noticeably slower, especially for large assemblies. For most work it's fine, but becomes unusable for the big scenes with lots of externally linked files.

 

Thanks IronCAD.

 

John

[jmouser]

Computer: Dell Precision 330

Video Card: Sonic Blue Fire GL-2

IronCAD Performance: Outstanding.

 

Additional notes: A little sketchy with Pro/E sometimes, namely highlighted entities in sketcher don't always appear in real time. Also slow in Pro/E when switching from shaded view to hidden or non-hidden view in 3D.

 

Note on notes: Are we allowed to say Pro/E in here? I promise not to push it.

[Guest dlalonde]

3dLabs GVX1 on a P3-800 / NT4

I definitely agree that pro video cards and their drivers are better, but the consumer grade cards are getting to be quite good. Hardware T + L has changed everything. I've tried both types in my system - the geforce cards are fast but the GVX1 manages to feel smooth and expensive, and its images are gorgeous. Has anyone else noticed geforce 'quirks' such as slow rotation when multiple ironcad scenes are open, or colorless handles when full openGL is enabled? I kept the GVX1.

 

 

[Chris Lohman]

I just ran IronCAD 4.2 on a Win2K PC with a GEForce2 GTS card with 64 ram, using the latest Detonator Reference Drivers. It was very wierd. The handles and anchors lost their color. When I rotated the part the handles were red, when I stopped they disappeared. They still worked, just couldn't see them. I always use a black background and when I switched to grey I found that the interior of the handles went transparent, but the "Edges" of the handles remained? So they were hollow.

 

My next text was realistic rendering. I had hoped that this card would produce a very nice photo quality rendering. It was about the same as my G400 MAX. One thing I did notice though was once I switched to Realistic Rendering, added Texture and Bump maps, setup lights, and really set this thing up for a quality photo rendering, it slowed to a crawl. The resulting image seemed to be the same as my card @ work, but it took much longer to render.

 

So the verdict? I'd say the card is adequate for small assemblies as long as you stay in shaded rendering. I really didn't notice any camera slowdown, like orbiting, it was only when I cranked up the setting to produce nice images that it seemed to choke. Would I recommend it? Well, I only used it for about 3 hours. In that 3 hours, yeah it was ok.

[Guest bkline]

Fire GL2 is great with IC 4.2. No problems with very large assemblies with very high polygon counts. But this card is bad with Cinema 4DXL 7.1.

[Guest Scott Wallis]

I am running a Dell 1ghz P3 with a Geforce Ultra 64mb card. I have the same problems as in Chris's post. All of the problems I have are only evident when the rendering options are set to OpenGL. On Automatic it works fine. In addition if I use OpenGL, and use a gradient color background (and only one view in the window), then use the Look At or Fit Scene tools it will leave the previous image on the screen and overlay the new one. Similarly, an animation will leave a "trail". The only answer I have found is to run in Automatic unless I need a smooth animation in which case I use a solid background and OpenGL. Having a second view open allows me to use a gradient or other image background, but slows the animation considerably. I am running the Detonator driver also. I hope they come out with an update that will help.

 

 

[Corey Cooper]

I have the same problem w/it leaving the previous image. I run IC4.2SP1 on a Dell Precision 330 workstation w/fire GL2 graphics card (64 megs). If I turn the overlay plane on, thats when I have problems. So I turn the overlay plae off and use automatic and things work just fine. Does anyone know what the overlay plane does anyway?

 

 

[Rick Dorrington]

We have the same problems with the overlay plane.

IBM Intellistation M-Pro P4-1500 Fire GL-2.

The GL-2 card is very good in most cases with IronCad. We run with overlay plane turned off and automatic.

 

An interesting sidenote to this configuration. The GL-2 card has a digital output and our IBM P260 monitors have a digital input. Good news except that we have to run a 15 pin analog/digital adaptor because IBM doesn't know how to run a cable between the different digital connectors. ( I guess the "standards" are different, how dumb!)

 

From the IronCad Help:

 

Overlay Plane. This option is usually supported only by high-end graphics cards and may require edits to your systems Display options. Select this option to use an overlay plane for line display on parts. This results in greater rendering speed by eliminating full re-draw each time the part is selected or modified. If this option is selected, overlay plane is supported by system hardware, and Automatic is specified as the Renderer, IronCAD will automatically activate OpenGL rendering full-time in the scene

[jloach]

Good to hear you had the same problem with the Fire GL2's digital-out port (that's a terrible thing to say, isn't it?). I'm using a NEC MultiSync FP1350X, which also has a digital-in port. With the Fire GL2 it results in a very noisy picture, though, so I use it with its analog port.

 

The analog port gives outstanding results, though. I don't know how digital could be better!

[Guest EricFoy]

I'm using a Radeon VE. It performs reasonably well for a low-priced card, and it was a great upgrade from my old Millenium (20, I think?). With the Matrox, running OpenGL was a waste of time, but now I run OpenGL full time.

 

I'm looking forward to trying the latest Radeon version. I think the new ones have overlay plane capability, and ATI is pressing the OpenGL driver technology hard now. These are boards which I can afford, which is kool...

 

 

[Andrew Owens]

I'm getting ready to purchase a new mid-range Open GL video card. If you have any experience with these types of video cards, please give your opinion on the one you're using. I'm especially interested if anyone has used any of the following cards:

 

ATI FIRE GL 8800

ATI FIRE GL 8700

ELSA GLoria III

 

Thanks,

 

Andy

 

[Guest dlalonde]

Just upgraded to a P4-1.6 and a Geforce4 Ti 4400 which is a higher end consumer game card. It really does a decent job with my 10meg ironcad scenes, and will be even better if I can figure out how to convert it to a quadro. But it doesn't display handle color fill in static openGL images, which sucks. Irondudes, please fix this !!

 

 

[dsulli]

We must remember, however, that just as Chevrolet will never make a Cavalier accelerate and handle as well as a Corvette, graphics card manufacturers will not make their low-cost (relatively) gaming cards just as capable with 3D modeling as their own high-end CAD cards.

[Guest mrehnelt]

Similar to Andrew above, I am also looking for feedback from IC users regarding mid range graphics cards to use on Pentium 4 machines with Win 2000. The Elsa Gloria's (I & II) in particular. Anyone?

 

-Mike

[Andrew Owens]

I've been using the new ATI Fire GL 8800 128MB for about 6 weeks now, and it works very well with IC 5 on a single monitor. I have not tried the current drivers with two monitors yet. The multiple-monitor functions of the video driver that came with the card was pretty spastic and IC would not run if the window was wider than about 1600 pixels. I'm using two 1280 X 1024 displays laid out side-by-side. I don't know if IC has a limitation for window size that causes this problem, or if its a video driver problem. When I set the drivers to use the two monitors in a vertical layout, IC worked fine in 1280 w X 2048 h mode.

 

One bad thing I've noticed is that when you split the IC scene into 2 windows, rendering drops down to software mode, even if setup is set to OPEN GL. Hardware OPEN GL acceleration seems to stop, and both views become very sluggish. This may just be an IC bug too. If someone else can confirm that this happens on their machine too, please post a new topic about it so IronCAD can get it fixed.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Andrew Owens

[B. Ludin]

Andrew -

 

FYI, IC5.0hf2 works fine on my Dell Inspiron (GeForce2Go, 32MB) at 1600x1200.

 

Cheers,

 

Beat

 

 

[Guest dlalonde]

Windows is screwed where openGL and multiple monitors is concerned. Maybe 3dLabs had a way of making it work with their full-blast icd drivers, but I'm not sure. Flat-landers think their multimonitor systems work, but they don't actually use hardware openGL acceleration.

 

 

I turned my old geforce1-DDR into a quadro (gloria2) by moving some surface-mount resistors, the hardware was there all along, just needed the card to 'tell' the nvidia drivers that it was a quadro. It really does work well, especially the antialiased lines which are much faster than before the mod.

 

My old 3dLabs GVX1 was quite fast for it's time, but the new Geforce4 consumer card just smokes it (and I haven't done the Quadro-mod yet!). The new pro cards will have to be fast indeed to make this thing look like a compromise.

 

I'm using it with a P4 and win2k, love it, was much cheaper than any pro card, still might get out the microscope and move the programming resistors some day....

 

It appears that even cards with the quadro chips (Elsa!) will not show handle and dot color fill in openGL when the display is static (camera not zooming panning etc). Hopefully the Irondudes can fix this soon.

 

Pro Cards are nice - - but I guess it depends on who's writing the cheque, eh?

 

 

[Andrew Owens]

dlalonde,

 

Sounds interesting! Where did you find the video card modification info, and what is the difference between the old and new drivers?

 

- Andy

[Guest jkim522093]

As far as I know, operating system Windows 2000/XP of Microsoft does not

support OpenGL for dual monitor configuration.

More precisely, operating system supports the openGL acceleration for the

primary monitor only. That means if sosmebody wants to get the openGL

acceleration under dual monitor, then the application(atleast the main view

window) should be on primary monitor.

(If the view is on secondary monitor or if the view is on both primary and

secondary monitor, then the display performance will be dropped.)

So the performance drop under dual monitor configuration, Andrew pointed,

is not the IronCAD problem but the limitation of operating system.

 

As far as I know, only a few graphics card from 3Dlabs support hardware

openGL acceleration for dual monitor with their own driver.

 

JH.

[Guest mrehnelt]

dlalonde: Can you elaborate on the specific Geforce4 card you have, there are umpteen different models. Thanks

 

-Mike

[Guest dlalonde]

I have an Asus V8440 which has the Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4400 chipset.

 

Here's some info about Nvidia cards. The standard Nvidia reference drivers will run any of it's products including quadro cards....please note that moving surface mount resistors is a serious pain, even with proper tools. Have fun.

 

http://www.nvworld.ru/docs/sqe.html

 

http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis

 

http://guru3d.com/guide/quadro-modify/index1.shtml

 

 

[Guest dlalonde]

Hi Ironpeople, here is an article/review of openGL video cards that you may find informative.

Cheers,

Dave

 

 

[Guest dlalonde]

Doh, the url ....

 

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3428,a=27268,00.asp