Solid Designer and NT boxes

[Scott Grumbles]

Investigating NT boxes any info on the Tri-Star with an AccelEcclipse graphics card or Intergraph with thier proprietary graphics card? Leaning towards Tri-Star.

[peter sweet]

Scott...running HP Kayak XW's with AccelEclipse II video card on NT 4.0...The AccelEclipse video card has 2 nasty bugs in the video diver. 1st...cannot save enviroment files within SD. Lots and lots of crashes too. Will need to get a driver patch from Co-Create. Patch fixed saving enviroment files, but crashes happen weekly now instead of daily. 2nd...The current driver from AccelGraphics will not let you run OpenGL optimized for SD, if you log onto NT other than Administrator. Expecting a fix for this from AccelGraphics late July 98. 3rd...if your assemblies are to be greater than 50 parts, you must get 256 meg memory. We started out with 128 and what a DOG. The Eclipse II video seems alright, but I have only 4 meg video cards to compare it too. Price has dropped from $3000 to $2300 SRP. Make sure you get the Eclipse II and not the defunked Eclipse. Intergraphs video card IS NOT SUPPORTED with Solid Designer....any video woes, you will be on your own. HP blows when it comes to their hardware/software support with Solid Designer. I use VDS support and their kinda ok, but recently I seem to know more than they do. Frankly....SD is a UNIX product and should be run on a UNIX platform!!!! Release 5.1 of SD was the FIRST offical release of SD on NT....still needs ALOT of work, esp. in memory management. Our company would not spring for UNIX boxes, if your company will...go for the UNIX Boxes. Good Luck Peter Sweet

[peter sweet]

Scott...running HP Kayak XW's with AccelEclipse II video card on NT 4.0...The AccelEclipse video card has 2 nasty bugs in the video diver. 1st...cannot save enviroment files within SD. Lots and lots of crashes too. Will need to get a driver patch from Co-Create. Patch fixed saving enviroment files, but crashes happen weekly now instead of daily. 2nd...The current driver from AccelGraphics will not let you run OpenGL optimized for SD, if you log onto NT other than Administrator. Expecting a fix for this from AccelGraphics late July 98. 3rd...if your assemblies are to be greater than 50 parts, you must get 256 meg memory. We started out with 128 and what a DOG. The Eclipse II video seems alright, but I have only 4 meg video cards to compare it too. Price has dropped from $3000 to $2300 SRP. Make sure you get the Eclipse II and not the defunked Eclipse. Intergraphs video card IS NOT SUPPORTED with Solid Designer....any video woes, you will be on your own. HP blows when it comes to their hardware/software support with Solid Designer. I use VDS support and their kinda ok, but recently I seem to know more than they do. Frankly....SD is a UNIX product and should be run on a UNIX platform!!!! Release 5.1 of SD was the FIRST offical release of SD on NT....still needs ALOT of work, esp. in memory management. Our company would not spring for UNIX boxes, if your company will...go for the UNIX Boxes. Good Luck Peter Sweet

[Claus Brod]

Scott & Peter,<p> the AccelEclipse and AccelEclipse II boards are supported officially and work fine. We are using several AccelEclipse and AccelEclipse II boards here in the lab for quite some time without major problems. I have been using one myself for a year or so; the only major issue came up when I updated to an uncertified driver to verify Peter's bug report and write a patch for it. Peter, I'm sorry to hear that apparently my patch for SD 5.1x did not fix all of your crashes. I'd be interested to hear more about the circumstances of the "weekly crashes" which you are running into now.<p> By the way, you don't need a special patch if you use SolidDesigner 6.0.<p> The difference between the AccelEclipse and AccelEclipse II boards is minor - the AccelEclipse II board has a slightly improved DMA interface for the PCI bus. This does not have any significant impact on 3D performance in SolidDesigner, though. As far as I know, AccelGraphics no longer sells the AccelEclipse board.<p> We have also tested an Intergraph Realizm board inofficially and found that it works OK, and is quite a bit faster (but also a lot more expensive) than the AccelEclipse. We do not support any Intergraph boards officially yet, however.<p> I haven't had any experience with Tri-Star hardware, so I cannot comment on this part of the question. As a general guidelines, PC graphics board rely heavily on CPU power, i.e. graphics performance scales almost linearly with CPU and bus performance. Only the most recent boards (such as HP's Visualize fx4) seem to improve on this.<p> Claus

[Claus Brod]

Scott,<p> another note: There are certainly good reasons to run SolidDesigner on UNIX boxes, especially if you need high-end graphics performance or if you need more than 512 MB of main memory for your models. When using SolidDesigner 6.0, however, you get better modelling performance on the PC - at a fraction of the price of a UNIX workstation.<p> By the way, I am currently trying to get more customer feedback on the NT version of SolidDesigner and which specific areas need to be addressed to help you in your daily work. So if you or anyone reading this forum has some input on this, I'd be happy to learn more about it and feed it into our plans for upcoming releases.<p> Thanks,<p> __Claus

[Claus Brod]

Scott,<p> it is most probably a sure sign of aging, but I need to comment my own postings once more... I just learnt that is very well possible to use more than 512 MB of main memory with the more recent systems. A Pentium II 350 or 400 MHz processor with the 440 BX chipset, for example, allows to use 1 GB, provided that you have enough and the right RAM slots on the board and a BIOS which supports a cacheable area of that size. Server systems using the 440GX and 440NX chipsets can address even more memory (2 and 8 GB). My earlier statement still holds true for most of the older Pentium II systems, however.<p> Claus

[Peter Sweet]

Scott, finally fixed our AccelEcclipse video card problems.....we trashed'em (gave'em back to HP) and got Fx4 video cards. SD now runs the way it should. Running them (Fx4) 4 months now with no crashes and no annoying video bugs we were having. Pete