RE: A little bit off topic

From: James Carruthers (jim@hydraulicdesign.net)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2000 - 06:18:49 EET


Hi,

(This is sort of an inauspicious first post, wildy off-topic, but anyway...)

Paul,

I think what you're referring to is the "Quadro," which is the "pro" version
of the nVidia GeForce chip. It's actually exactly the same, it's just that
it has certain features enabled that are not on the 'gaming' versions. Now
that really ticks me off, the difference in price is totally
unjustificable--though depending on what apps you use, you may not notice
any difference--but it is the current reigning king of the CAD benchmarks,
so they can get away with it. Maybe an Intergraph Wildcat 4110 or the
highest-end HP or SGI stuff is a bit faster in certain situations, but
that's it.

"DDR" is the type of memory used on certain GeForce cards...I don't know if
a DDR Quadro is available, or will be, or what. Basically it doubles the
theoretical bandwidth through the trick of transferring on both the rising
and falling edges of each clock cycle. It mainly impacts the "fill rate,"
which (at least they say) is not a big deal for CAD, it's for games where
you've got lots of effects going on. You might notice a diff if you like to
run at really high resolutions, as the use of DDR is really a crutch to
compensate for a fill-rate which is really not up to the standards for this
generation of card. But as I said, you might not notice it, and myself, I
got a TNT 2 Ultra six months ago(it's roughly equivalent to the VX1 in GL
apps, and a lot better in games,)and I'm waiting for nVidia's next-gen
stuff.

Jim
----------------------------------------------------------------------
James Carruthers
Hydraulic Design
613-851-9270
http://www.hydraulicdesign.net
mailto:jim@hydraulicdesign.net
----------------------------------------------------------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-rp-ml@bart.lpt.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@bart.lpt.fi]On Behalf
> Of Paul Betts
> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 9:50 AM
> To: Ram Nagulpally
> Cc: Ola L.A. Harrysson; RPML
> Subject: Re: A little bit off topic
>
>
>
> List:
>
> If you are building a machine now you're kind of caught in the middle of a
> product development cycle.
>
> The Fire GL1 is only AGP 2X capable. The Oxygen cards are AGP 4X capable
> but now nVidia chips are coming out with "double data rate" chips.
>
> Right now (to the best of my limited knowledge) ELSA Gloria II is the only
> card that has the nVidia DDR chip. It has 64 meg of ram and is AGP 4x
> compliant. It is around $650 USD.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Paul
>
> > Ola:
> >
> > The Oxygen VX1 card is one of the ones that we recomend for use with
> > Paraform software. We have looked at it closely since it offers a good
> > cost to performance benefit. At $175-195, you cant go wrong with it.
> >
> > If you dont mind spending a little more money, you can try the FireGL1
> > (Diamond) or the Oxygen GVX1 (3D Labs). Both these can be purchased in
> > the $700 range. You should definitely shop around on the net. The price
> > for these varies from $650- 900. These provide more UMPH!! in terms of
> > performance/quality than the VX1 card.
> >
> > goodluck
> >
> > ram
> >
>

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 23:02:55 EEST