A variety of high-performance add-on graphics boards are now available that offer stunning graphics performance for relatively low cost. Performance-wise, these boards compare favorably to what previously was available only from a dedicated graphics workstation such as those manufactured by Silicon Graphics or Evans & Sutherland. The table below summarizes the performance of some of the boards we have tested for use with Chimera. Our list is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather a representative sample of what is available on the market today. The SGI Octane2 workstation is included for comparison purposes. Also, some of the numbers are based on marketing literature from the manufacture and therefore may represent theoretical best-case performance, while the various benchmark numbers come from standards-based measured performance tests from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's OpenGL benchmark, SPECviewperf.
In general, PC graphics cards with support for OpenGL should perform reasonably well as long as there is hardware stencil support. (Software stencil implementations are probably too slow for standard Chimera graphics.) Note that the best performing add-on boards are based on the Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) card slot, rather than a normal expansion slot on the PCI peripheral bus. AGP 4x is the most recent and fastest version of this dedicated graphics slot, so if you are purchasing a new PC be sure and look for one that has at least an AGP 2x slot, and preferably an AGP 4x slot. (See this review for a comparison of the impact the different speed AGP slots have on performance.) Also be sure to check the graphics hardware vendor's web site for the most recent version of device drivers, since often the drivers that ship with the hardware are not up to date. It's always a good idea to check the results of the Graphics Performance Characterization benchmark (SPECgpc) if you are considering an add-on graphics board other than the ones listed below.
Fire GL2 Gloria III Synergy III Synergy 2000 SGI Octane2 Street Price $800 $850 $350 $200 $20,995 Graphics Chipset IBM RC1000/
IBM RT1000Quadro2 Pro Quadro2 MXR Quadro2 EX VPro V12 3D Vector Performance
(millions of vectors/sec)31 Rendering Performance
(millions of polygons/sec)27 31 25 21 18.1 Frame Buffer Performance
(millions of pixels/sec)410 1,000 400 350 448 Texture Mapping Performance
(millions of texels/sec)200 2,000 448 AWadvs-04 benchmark 122.3 158.9 62.0 ProCDRS-03 benchmark 39.4 39.2 21.9 DRV-07 benchmark 28.6 37.8 20.6 DX-06 benchmark 43.2 50.0 36.7 Light-04 benchmark 10.5 11.7 10.8 MedMCAD-01 benchmark 38.2 42.1 23.6 Support for stereo viewing? Yes No No No Yes Notes: SPECviewperf benchmarks report performance in frames per second. Check the official summary of results for the latest numbers.
The AWadvs-04 and ProCDRS-03 benchmarks most closely approximate the type of 3-D graphics functionality used in Chimera.Product reviews are available for the Fire GL2, the GeForce2 MX, the ELSA Gladiac MX, and NVIDIA Under Linux. Or check out these Ace's Hardware on-line reviews: Professional Grade and Professional Grade Revisited.
Comments about this document should be directed to tef@cgl.ucsf.edu. This document was last updated on 31 May 2002.
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