We’re trying to purchase a Boxx mobile station. Up until friday they said their best model was sporting a NVidia Quadro FX3700.
Today, we’ve got an email:
a Core i7 chip now (latest)and the onboard graphics will be GeForce M280 (1GB ram) card rather than the Nvidia Quadro FX3700.
Does anyone here know the core i7 technology and how the GeForce M280 compares to the Quadro FX3700? I know the 3700 is the mobile version that most compare to the quadro 5600,
but how’s the M280?
here’s some more generic info I’ve found of the difference between quadro and geforce. They seem very substantial (ie can someone explain clipping regions and other items down here?)
Well high resolution is one major difference, support and reliability is another. Some of the main features that differentiate a Quadro from a Geforce:
Line and Point AA (not FSAA) for wireframe models
Up to 8 clipping regions (to the Geforce’s 1)
HW accelerated clipping planes
HW accelerated overlay planes
2-sided lighting
OpenGL logic operation support
Quad-buffered stereo viewing for passive (polarized) or active (shutter) 3D
I think theres more but thats all i can think of, i think memory is managed better on Quadros too.
EDIT: Some of those features you probably wont need, but some of them are simply expected by highend CAD applications and if they arent available you will either experience odd behavior (say if you’re missing 2-sided lighting) or the application will have to emulate it in software which will cause a big slowdown.
The main features that Quadros have that TouchDesigner can take advantage of (other than speed, reliability, support, memory etc.), is the GPU affinity feature. That’s only useful if you are putting multiple GPUs in a single system though.
Most of the features you listed seem to be supported by Geforces (2 sided lighting and logic operations for example), or aren’t useful to TouchDesigner, like clipping planes and overlay planes.
Both Quadro and Geforces suffer from the same issue whereby if you have two different models of monitors connected to the same card, it can only sync to one monitor correctly (usually the primary monitor, but not always). The other monitor will suffer from horizontal tearing.
Yes, DualView on Vista/Windows 7 could potentially be a solution to this, but we haven’t tested this thoroughly yet.
"OpenGL quad-buffered stereo delivers the highest quality 3D stereoscopic viewing:
3D OpenGL quad-buffered stereo gives each eye a unique view from a slightly different perspective.
It uses four buffers (front right, front left, back right, back left), rather than two buffers
(front and back). "
in opengl display loop you can use sth like this i think
glDrawBuffer(GL_BACK_LEFT); //draw into back left buffer
glDrawBuffer(GL_BACK_RIGHT); //draw into back right buffer
Is this feature supported in touch ?
the idea is to render two cameras, one for left and one for right.
output one on monitor 1 and the other one on monitor 2.
We have lots of people (virtually all our potential clients) asking if we can render 3D - which is as you know the standard for animations now (since - I must say - it finally looks good!)
I actually think that using the BACK_LEFT BACK_RIGHT buffers is an old way of doing 3D for nvidia. They are going towards a more driver orientated method where the driver does the work for you, as long as you do your rendering in a manner that it finds predictable.
It’s likely you’ll need a few more features/GPU usage changes to Touch to get it to work perfectly, but since it’s mostly driver specific, you’ll be able to test without any code changes by us (which you would have needed if BACK_LEFT BACK_RIGHT buffers was still the method to do it).
It’s entirely possible that Touch’s current GPU rendering method (the fact that rendering order can arbitrary due to the order nodes cook) is so different from a normal game that the driver can’t figure us out though.
I think they support both ways, the Quadro quad buffer professional stereo nvidia.com/object/quadro_ste … ology.html
and the new Geforce 3d stereo driver (“kind of post effect”).
The problem i see with the new geforce 3D stereo driver is that its currently
not compatible with many professional 3d stereoscopic projectors (for example
reald and reald cinema).
Also, when the geforce 3d stereo driver does the 3d effect based on some simple
calculations like offsetting the image/pixels based on their depth, it might be tricky
to render certain effects / post processing. I still doubt it can generate the same
quality 3d stereoscopy as real 3d applications based on the quadro …
Are you planning to add support for stereoscopic 3D rendering ?
if yes would you want to support Geforce or Quadro or both ?
If you have two render tops, wouldn’t it be possible to add a flag to render to either
BACK_LEFT or BACK_RIGHT ??
We haven’t talked about our plans for stereoscopic yet.
No, it’s much more complex than this. The Render TOPs render offscreen; the spot where you need to put your left and right image is the onscreen window. There are a lot of issues to sort out to add this to Touch. More caveats and issues come up with Vista too as I hear things don’t work unless you do everything in a very specific way (but I haven’t tested so I’m not sure).
Can I resurrect this thread? I have a need to do active stereo output for a DepthQ projector and wondered if Derivative has any plans to make this an option? Right now I have a Component that allows me to render stereoscopically from touch using side/side over/under and anaglyph. But I am now at a point where I really need active. Going the NVIDIA driver route won’t work because I am rendering out stereo textures on my 3D objects which would not be detected as 3D drawing directives by the driver.
It would be really nice if Touch worked with quad buffer cards!