Video Card Review

[bstankie]

Hi All,
I was wondering if anyone could post a review of video cards for use with Vizard and HMDs. Perhaps a short list of video cards, their approximate costs, their stereo-vision capabilities, etc. Something like this might be useful to this audience.

Or, if someone knows of a good web page that does this already that would be great.

Thanks,
Brian J. Stankiewicz

[mspusch]

Hi Brian,

Andy Beall is posting a pretty good overview for current VR technology components on the market at his page

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/~beall/vrtechcomp.htm

A selection of nVidia (www.nvidia.com) based cards are recommended there.

Keep in mind that you'll need a twinview (n-view) card with two monitor ports (monitor and TV does NOT do the job) to support stereo viewing.

Matthias

[bstankie]

Thanks. In terms of the dual monitor cards, I have a card that has a VGA and a DVI output. Can this be used for the dual monitors? Is there a DVI-to-VGA dongle?

-Brian

[mspusch]

Hi Brian,

There are VGA DVI adapters available for a couple bucks, for example at CompUSA but also at most online stores (like Amazon).
So if you have a HMD with dual VGA input, your card should work fine with Vizard.

Have fun!

Matthias

[tobin]

WorldViz mostly uses nVidia cards but in the last year ATI has done an excellent job catching up and now surpassing at least in terms of raw numbers. Both the latest nVidia (geforce and quadro series) and ATI Radeon support dual monitors which means you get support for high-end HMDs.

The two specs to watch out for are the polygon draw rate and the pixel fill rate. The former is more important is you're interesting in having really complex scenes with lots of polygonal detail; the latter better predicts how robust your performance for immersive environments will be.

The chart below shows various specs including the pixel fill rates; it is reproduced from the following web address:
http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/Grap...n9800Pro.shtml

The differences are real but probably not significant enough to get too excited about. WorldViz has had excellent experience with nvidia in terms of the quality of OpenGL support and legacy drivers. We have very little experience with ATI at this point but will endeavor to gain some experience in the near future. Without that experience, I can't strongly recommend ATI cards yet. One other thing to note between the two cards, however, is that the latest nVidia uses two slots whereas the ATI only uses one. This might be important to you if you're packing lots of cards into one computer.