Video Card for OSD Drafting and Modeling

[pcushion]

I am in the process of spec'ing out a new PC to run ME10, Solid Designer, AutoCAD (AAAHHH!).
(I know, I know, but I have a vendor in PA that uses AutoCAD and it helps when they are having troubles with a file I send them,
to be able to see what they are talking about.)

Any way, I am looking at 1 of these 3 controllers.

One is the supplied GCard, which is an
Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics controller
It is a bus type (AGP8X), the graphics memory is shared with the system which can vary between 8 - 64 Mb, depending on the amount of
system mem. installed.

Or, a choice of fixed VCards:
NVIDIA GeForce MX440/8 (64Mb, 8XAGP, DVI, S-video)
NVIDIA Quadro 100NVS AGP (64Mb, dual VGA) full height.

So, what is your vote.
Your opinion will count.

Thanks for your help.
Paul.

[May Kung]

Is budget of concern? I would assume the integrated graphics solution is the cheapest.

Personally, I would only use integrated video with a system that did not depend on good graphics performance (email, web surfing, office apps, etc.), especially if it uses shared memory.

For gaming or CAD work, I would opt for a standalone card. The Quadro is a "professional" grade card, while the GeForce is a "consumer" grade one. Practically speaking, aside from better driver support for the pro card, I do not know how significant the performance difference would be, assuming common vintages of cards.

Neither card is listed as officially supported on the CoCreate site, though.

[clausb]

As May already said, none of those cards is officially certified. The Quadro comes closest, since there is a unified driver for the Quadro cards and we have tested and certified so many Quadro versions that we probably have achieved very reasonable test coverage of the driver code.

However, just because a card isn't listed as an officially certified card doesn't mean that it won't run OSDM. In fact, OSDM itself has only very modest requirements on a card and its driver. Essentially, it will run on anything that has an OpenGL driver. I am not aware of graphics cards which do not have an OpenGL driver, so unless I'm mistaken here, it means OSDM will run on anything.

That said, there are of course differences in driver quality. Also, if you find an issue in a certified driver, you can report it to us, and we will directly work with the hardware vendor to have the driver bug fixed. So far, we have managed to cover pretty much all reported issues this way.

For graphics cards which are not officially certified, you will have to talk to the hardware vendor directly and somehow persuade them to fix the problem.

If I were you, I'd first try the on-board graphics chip and test it for a while. It probably will work just fine, maybe except for performance. If you find a problem, you can either report it to the hardware vendor, or you can still decide to add a more advanced graphics card to the system.

Just my 0.02E,

Claus

[John Scheffel]

Although not officially supported, we have found no problems with GeForce 4 cards such as the MX440 that you list. They are pretty fast and very cheap compared to the Quadro line. However, if you try one of these, I would recommend that you download the latest reference drivers from the nVidia web site and use them. We have seen some problems with the drivers supplied on the CD with the card.

[pcushion]

Thank you all very much.

I have been doing some research and the card that stuck out between
the 2 plug-in types was the NVIDIA Quadro4 100NVS AGP card.

So, I am going to go with that one, only becuase on the NVIDIA web site it is touted as a 2D/3D applications card more so than the other.

Thanks again for your inputs.
Paul.

:D