Chris Lohman Posted March 18, 2003 Author Share Posted March 18, 2003 I never got around to sending dsulli a scene for benchmarking; but I still intend to do so. The nVidia issues have been fixed but the new driver has not officially released on their site. I can give you a stable pre-release driver for all quadro cards on Win2K and XP if you need it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted March 18, 2003 Author Share Posted March 18, 2003 Here's the latest nVidia driver that I have. It's for Quadro only, on Win2K/XP 4242forXP2K.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsulli Posted March 19, 2003 Share Posted March 19, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Per-Arne Almeflo: We are getting close to the purchase of new work stations. I believe it will be the HP XV 4000 of some sort, but we have yet to decide about the graphics cards. The ATI Fire GL 8800 has been raved about here, are you still satisfied with this also with the new IronCAD 6.0? What about the newer ATI's, the GL X1, Z1 or E1? Anyone tried these? Or are the Nvidia driver issues fixed by now? What about the benchmarks, dsulli? id=quote>id=quote> We now have four GL 8800 users and one Fire GL2 user; none has had any issues with IC V6.0. I have heard many good things about the Quadros as well, but a recent article in one of the MCAD mags selected the GL 8800 as a great buy (<$300) and is highly recommended. And I am still amazed with my OEM-issue ATI Rage 128 (32MB) card that I have at home. It performs very well with small-to-medium tasks in IronCAD and is very inexpensive. It's rendering speed blows away my old NVidia GForce 32 MB card that is in my 3+ year old system and is not far behind the rendering speed of the GL8800 in my XI system at work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Dorrington Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 Greetings All, Looking at some new workstations. Does anybody have any thoughts or comments about the following video cards? 256MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 256MB 3Dlabs Wildcat4 7110 What about serial ATA/100/7200 vs SCSI Ultra320/10000? Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted October 16, 2003 Author Share Posted October 16, 2003 I would never purchase a wildcat card for IronCAD. While the 3d Labs cards work fine because we use only the most generic of OpenGL calls in our rendering; in the future if we start supporting hardware features in our rendering engine; the hardware that we support will be nVidia and ATI first (speculation at this point). 3D Labs doesn't do anything with their card that is superior enough to justify their major price difference in my opinion. Plus I prefer the driver release cycles and methods for obtaining tech support from nVidia over 3d labs. The 256 meg cards really won't be a benefit over the 128 meg cards with IronCAD right now. The 128 meg Quadro FX 1000 and 2000 nVidia cards are so powerful right now that their power has exceeded the capacity of our rendering engine. So if you jump up to the 256 card; you may see some speed increase based on the GPU; but the extra ram won't help you; right now at least. The future will of course hold changes in our applications that may make the 256 megs valuable to you; but right now it doesn't make sense to purchase it just for IronCAD. The SATA drives are getting close to SCSI, especially if the drive has the 8meg cache in it. For models that are under 40 megs in size; the SATA will perform just fine (IF you get the 7200 RPM disks with the 8 meg or higher cache). The 10krpm SCSI will be faster than the ATA but not by a noticeable factor until your file sizes are 50megs+. Now if you go with a SCSI RAID card that has 32/64 megs of RAM on it; and 15krpm scsi disks; then you will notice a very big speed difference between that and the SATA's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Dorrington Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 Chris, Thanks for the excellent summary. Much appreciated. Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 quote: Originally posted by Chris Lohman: Plus I prefer the driver release cycles and methods for obtaining tech support from nVidia over 3d labs. id=quote>id=quote> Are you working on getting into the certified application list of ATI also? I believe it is important to be seen in such places together with "the industrys key Computer Aided Design (CAD) companies". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted October 17, 2003 Author Share Posted October 17, 2003 Yes ATI is next Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pfarrer Posted October 23, 2003 Share Posted October 23, 2003 Partially on your recommendation Chris I brought the Quadro FX 500, 128 meg video card. (I couldn't find a supplier in Australia, so I imported it from the US) .....and fitted it to a computer I built up with the following specs: Asus P4C800 MB 2.6 P4 1G 3200 RAM 80GB 150 Sata HD 19" G420 Sony monitor. Win 2000 etc. I'm quite happy with the system, despite a few bugs. The system is fast to render and the image quality is great, and overall it's working well, but a bit of future "tweaking" should make it even better. Peter Farrer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted October 23, 2003 Author Share Posted October 23, 2003 Nice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted October 27, 2003 Share Posted October 27, 2003 quote: Originally posted by pfarrer: Partially on your recommendation Chris I brought the Quadro FX 500, 128 meg video card. Peter Farrer. id=quote>id=quote> Where did you find a recommendation for the Quadro FX 500 specifically? The Quadro 500 is based on the FX5200 card which really is not high performance card. In the tests I have seen, the old Quadro 750, 900 and 980XGL's are much faster than the new Quadro FX500. The new Quadro FX 1000 however is tested faster than those older cards. Also, Chris Lohman says: "We use only the most generic of OpenGL calls in our rendering" Would this mean that the use of a pro OpenGL card is a waste of money? The standard FX cards also have the most generic OpenGL support. Would a FX 5600 or higher be as fast as a Quadro FX1000 for most of the IronCAD use? What Solid Works users complain the most about for non-pro cards are their bad performance with lots of windows open. The IronCAD work flow does not use the same technique as Solid Works, where they drag the parts from all those open windows into the assembly, and hense that multi window quality is maybe not that important for us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pfarrer Posted October 27, 2003 Share Posted October 27, 2003 I put a post up on this forum back in June re the Quadro FX 500 and Chris L gave it a good report, based on tests he'd been doing at the time. http://www.ironcad.com/support/community/index.php?showtopic=587 I'm happy with the card, given the fact that the computer is really only used for IC 6. Peter Farrer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted October 29, 2003 Share Posted October 29, 2003 This is what tomshardware wrote about the Quadro FX 500 in a review of OpenGL cards: The output from the graphics pipeline is rather wretched. Just 45 millions triangles/s and a fill rate of 1.1 billion texels/s mean the Quadro FX 500 is only suitable for customers with few demands in rendering performance. The typical user uses it to create building plans, such as floor plans or office equipment, etc. and simple mechanical components. http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030916/opengl-08.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pfarrer Posted October 30, 2003 Share Posted October 30, 2003 ...then again it performed quite well accocording to the Cadence test. http://www.cadenceweb.com/2003/0803/cadlab0803b.html I'm quite happy with the card compared to my old Oxygen unit and I do some fairly complex designs..... so until it really "spits the dummy" right in the middle of a design job I guess I'm going to remain happy with it's performance. Peter Farrer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted October 30, 2003 Share Posted October 30, 2003 quote: Originally posted by pfarrer: ...then again it performed quite well accocording to the Cadence test. http://www.cadenceweb.com/2003/0803/cadlab0803b.html I'm quite happy with the card snip... Peter Farrer id=quote>id=quote> I'm happy when you are happy, and I don't write this to put you down, but to tell others that are about to shop, and who may have other expectations and needs, that this is not a top of the line card. The Cadence review covered low cost cards only, and they wrote: "ATI's FireGL Z1 significantly out-performs the other cards when running SolidWorks, making it well-suited for anyone who wants to get the best performance at a reasonable price point with today's mechanical design software." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 I would like to get back to my previous question: Chris Lohman says: "We use only the most generic of OpenGL calls in our rendering" Would this mean that the use of a pro OpenGL card is a waste of money? The standard FX cards also have the most generic OpenGL support. Would a FX 5600 be as fast as a Quadro FX1000 for IronCAD use? They are based on the same graphic processor, but the FX 5600 has some software based restrictions in the OpenGL performance. If those OpenGL tricks are not used, whats the reason to pay many times the price for the Quadro card? Chris, please enlighten us! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted November 10, 2003 Author Share Posted November 10, 2003 We have found that there is a noticable difference between consumer and professional cards in IronCAD in the past with regards to performance. We have found that the professional cards do have optimizations that improve their performance specifically in CAD type situations; whereas consumer cards do not. Consumer cards have, however, recently received significan't improvements that make them usable with IronCAD with small to moderate models. So until we upgrade our rendering engine next; the consumer cards are ok for now. Once we decide to put some serious work into the rendering engine though; we will only focus on improvements for the professional cards. (Note: I'm not saying anything about when or whether or not we will work on our rendering engine.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted November 10, 2003 Author Share Posted November 10, 2003 I want to also clarify that the 500 is not a top of the line card; but it "is" as powerful as IronCAD can use and it costs less than the Q4900 and most other "pro" cards. At this point I'm finding with my graphics cards test that the 500 has all the power that IronCAD could use. Beyond the 500; the 1000 and 3000 (which I have both tested in house) don't improve the rendering of IronCAD. So what I'm seeing is that the current top of the line hardware has more power than IronCAD is able to handle; thus the 1000 or 3000 and the FireGL Z1 and pretty much all of the 256 meg cards are not worth the money if you purchase them for IronCAD only. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 While working our way into more and more complex sawmill machinery, we feel that IronCAD gets a bit slow with large, or even semi large, models, especially after the drawings are created with their links. Therefore it would be great if you would improve IronCAD's ability to take advantage of the latest hardware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted November 10, 2003 Author Share Posted November 10, 2003 Yes we are aware of the current state of our rendering engine and have been discussing the solutions internally. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
don_temple Posted November 13, 2003 Share Posted November 13, 2003 ATI FireGL X1 128 I recently upgraded from an AI gamer card to the FireGL X1. It is deffenitly an improvement. System stability seems to be better but part edges and hidden edges still disappear durring part rotation and realistic rendering still takes the same amount of time. SpaceBalling in drafting is still jumpy and in modeling there is a greter tendancy for the renderer to flash to wireframe when I begin a rotation, then it renders the faces as it should. Also the X1 allows me to zoom in closer than the gamer card in modeling but zooming in too close still causes the model to "flip inside out", if it has happened to you you know what I mean. If anyone can suggest settings that will improve the card's performance I'm all ears. Injection mold, jig and fixture design. www.QuickCAD.biz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted November 13, 2003 Author Share Posted November 13, 2003 IronCAD doesn't render part edges during rotation by default; so any graphics card will produce the same disappearing edges during rotation. Shall I file an enhancement request on your behalf for part edges to be drawn during rotation? Insure you have instructed IronCAD to always use opengl through tools/options/rendering (uncheck automatic, check opengl [not camera only]). Upgrading a graphics card will show the most improvement in scene camera movements (orbit, pan, zoom). It's when moving the camera that we hit the graphics card. A stationary render in realistic mode uses the software pipe for rendering (Not the graphics card's processors). Exporting a rendering uses the software pipe for rendering. I have seen that inside out flipping but I've never intentionally reproduced it. I'm glad that you mentioned that as a result of zooming because now I may be able to produce a bug report from it. One other note with regards to the graphics card settings. While I can't recommend any settings that will enhance performance; I have found that if you setup these newer cards that allow you to "hard code" the antialiasing and anisotropic filtering; that if you set them to 4/8 (highest levels) by default for all apps; that this will cause the ironcad window to ghost itself in a wierd way when you exit the application. So just in case you notice that suddenly when you exit ironcad; the window does some wierd shrinking/ghosting/jumping before it closes; you'll know which setting did that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmccall Posted November 14, 2003 Share Posted November 14, 2003 From my experience, flipping inside out always seems to happen when using the spaceball... zooming in real close then the flipping happens and you are suddenly moving away from the part. Never happens to me when using the key commands for zooming etc. 4000flx spaceball 7500 radeon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Per-Arne Almeflo Posted November 26, 2004 Share Posted November 26, 2004 We have found that there is a noticable difference between consumer and professional cards in IronCAD in the past with regards to performance. We have found that the professional cards do have optimizations that improve their performance specifically in CAD type situations; whereas consumer cards do not. Consumer cards have, however, recently received significan't improvements that make them usable with IronCAD with small to moderate models. So until we upgrade our rendering engine next; the consumer cards are ok for now. Once we decide to put some serious work into the rendering engine though; we will only focus on improvements for the professional cards. (Note: I'm not saying anything about when or whether or not we will work on our rendering engine.) 2355[/snapback] Is the rendering engine upgraded now from IC 6 to IC 7.0? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tlehnhaeuser Posted November 30, 2004 Share Posted November 30, 2004 I guess I consider myself lucky, I have never worried about the video card in any system we purchased and NEVER had a problem. Some systems used: Integrapgh ZX10 (Realizm OpenGL) TriStar (Elsa Gladiac, discontinued) Compaq Laptop (ATI Rage Mobility) Custom ( Accel OpenGL) Acer Laptop (std AGP) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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