Which opengl card to buy??

[Spikedog]

I am running I-DEAS 11 on Windows XP and need to buy a new video card. I've searched the web and found no real good benchmarks for this opengl application. The obvious contenders are FireGL, Quadro FX and Wildcats. Can any one point me in the right direction here? I'm looking for a good price and performance ratio.

Thank you very much
Spike

 

[rbV5]

I'm not sure about that application, but a ti4200 makes a great budget OpenGL workstation card. Something like a 5900xt for a larger budget would be very good as well.

 

[SickBeast]

Read Duvie's thread about the Quadro softmod for an FX5800. If you can find a simple hardmod I would reccomend that as it will allow you to use the latest drivers. Stick with nVidia as they simply dominate everything else in this sector ATM.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
Stick with nVidia as they simply dominate everything else in this sector ATM.

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

Agree.

I use an Elsa Gloria 2 @ work (based off GF2 I think) and it is very fast on Pro/E. Not sure how Pro/E and I-deas are with respect to hardware efficiency, but I suspect they'd be pretty close.

If you don't plan on gaming, you can get any old Quadro card and probably be fine (I work on robots, so they are pretty small assemblies, often consisting of 100 or so parts plus 200 or so pieces of hardware (which, for some reason, our comany has extremely complex)).

For me, the P4 1.8 ony my work computer is much more of a bottleneck than the graphics card.

However, if you do game, then you will want to try either modding a gaming card or buying a higher end quadro so you can get the fillrate necessary for good gaming performance.

Also, I used my GF1 on my Pentuim2 400 and had great success with Pro/E and assemblies with a couple hundred parts.

So, what are you going to be designing? That might help us give a better recommendation for the design aspect (for gaming, you are pretty much stuck with getting a very high end card IMO, hehe).

-D'oh!

 

[BFG10K]

nVidia cards seem to have the edge in professional OpenGL apps.

 

[Spikedog]

Thanks for all the replies.

I should have been a little more specific. The cards will be used in high end workstations that I built for our analysts here. They work on very large models (>500,000 nodes). I built a test machine that will be the basis for replacement machines and they are somewhat unhappy with the video card. I used the Quadro FX1100. This card performs a little worse than their previous 2 year old card the wildcat II 5000. I was wondering if maybe the new Wildcat VP cards might be better or even the Fire GL cards. I haven't been able to find many benchmarks on the web to say one way or the other.

Again thank you,
Spike

 

[stnicralisk]

if you want better performance I dont suggest sticking with an ATi card. You can softmod a 5900 into a quadro 5900. I am sure thatd dominate the wildcat 2.

Hell my friend is creating a maya project using my 5950u.

 

[Cerb]

If you have the budget, get a 5900XT and a new Wildcat, and softmod the 5900XT--see what happens. If it works out well w/ the softmod, get the real quadro cards for the workstations.

Despite Quadros dominating, you can still seem to find apps that really, really, love 3DLabs cards.