Vizard 7 » Reference » Stereo & Displays » Stereo Basics » Recommendations
7.7
Vizard uses the OpenGL graphics API, so obtaining high performance rendering requires a suitable OpenGL graphics accelerator card. Since OpenGL is an industry standard in both scientific, engineering, and game applications, finding such cards at affordable prices is very easy. Our recommendations are the following:
(see Frame parallel (dual output) stereo for an explanation)
WorldViz believes that the maximum performance to cost ratio is obtained by nVidia's game class cards. One reason for this recommendation is extremely strong graphics acceleration for both geometry and texture filling (see Performance Tips for an explanation). Also factoring into this recommendation is nVidia's excellent reputation for driver support which is important when integrating and maintaining a full system. nVidia's game class cards are currently marked as the "GeForce" series. Other game class cards that are also excellent values are those by AMD. WorldViz has much less experience with these manufacturers and therefore we do not have more specific comments.
There also exists a variety of engineering class graphics cards. These cards are often an order of magnitude more expensive and for many applications such as those rendered using Vizard do not show a substantial increase in performance (in fact, sometimes the performance is actually worse.) One reason for this is that very often virtual reality based applications are designed similar to the way games are designed (strong use of textures versus polygons, sparse use of lights, no need for exotic clipping planes, etc). When a virtual reality application is designed similarly to a game applications, then it truly is difficult to beat the performance enabled by the consumer game class cards.
An important exception to this generalization concerns researchers needing to create visual display of maximum quality and most free of artifact. The game class cards often seems to cut corners and may not provide 100% compliance to OpenGL standards. An example of this includes double-buffering that is synchronized to the vertical refresh rate. Guaranteeing that no artifact will happen can often be quite trying with low-cost 3D cards and for a researcher who needs to insure that there this will not happen (e.g., generating stereoscopic images) it might be worth purchasing a higher quality card and even possibly sacrificing speed performance. WorldViz cannot research and provide answers as to all the cards in this industry as it is too diverse and too rapidly changing (card life cycles are approximating 9 months) so we can only point out some of the important issues.
The issues and recommendation for single channel cards are essentially the same as those for dual channel cards. Game class cards are more easily tolerated even for scientific applications because the double-buffering and synchronization concerns a single instead of dual display.
What to consider: