#Graphics Cards
3 messages in this thread
I am a professional mechanical engineer planning to use 3DS in my Expert
Witness side business and expand to general computer visualization for
attorneys, engineers and other professionals. The system I am looking at is
the Gateway 2000 486/66 VESA local-bus. However, the dealer, also an Autodesk
rep., says that the ATI Ultra Pro has a problem with 3DS and has substituted a
Genoa local-bus card. I like what I have heard about the ATI and prefer not to
break up the Gateway system. Any comments about this?
I also welcome any other thoughts you may have regarding my plans.
Thank you.
William :
It reall depends on the Resolution your looking for.
If you want 24 bits you may want to look into better cards like the Hercules
Chrome(I Own one No problems) and I do not know if the Local bus will help
speed up 3ds I believe that the CPU is the only reall place where you pick up
speed (remember that if you use a DX2 66 the CPU is 66 Mhz but the mother board
is still running at 33MHz) other cards like TrueVision 1024-32, VideoLogic
Rapier 24, #9GXiTC are very good cards Truevision is slower in windows, Rapier
24 is the fastest in windows (had some problems with windows and installing it
into 3ds) #9GXiTC is the easest to install but produced equal speeds as the
Hercules Chrome. The 1024-32 and #9 are single solutions cards, while the
Rapier and Chrome need a VGA PassThrough.
Raymond Stivala
Animator
P.S. I wrote a review on 24 bit Video cards for the IBM and this was I findings
in a nut shell.
I can't speak for the Gateway/ATI VLB system, but we have used the ATI VLB card
w/2MB VRAM and 3DS2 _intensively_ with no problem. There was a problem with
their VESA driver, but they made a new one available last week. The major
problem is knowing how to set up the card and avoiding conflicts. Your major
delays in 3DS are the screen redraws which are more CPU intensive and get only
a slight speedup from the faster throughput. Outside of 3DS however, their
Windows drivers have just barely been stabilized, and you can still run into
problems with some applications. I don't believe the ATI card will work well
with another video card in the system, so using it in conjunction with another
card like the Chrome may be out of the question. I think you need to evaluate
what your final output will be. If your presentations are going out to tape,
you will need a video board that you can output a clean TV signal from, and
probably a decent SVGA card to work from. If your looking for a board
comparison list, Steve Gibson has a video review program that I believe is
available in one of the PC forums. He benchmarked all the major ISA and local
bus boards using different benchmarks and broke down the results. The Local
Bus winner was the Diamond Viper, the ISA winner was the Hercules Graphite
(which usually beat even the local bus boards).
Good Luck,
DanP