VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 13 2000 - 12:50:58 CDT

Hi,
  I had read that NVidia (at some point) was considering releasing
a version of the GeForce that used a PCI interface, to serve the
same market as the PCI based Voodoo3's that are out there. I don't
know if this was just a marketing gimmick or if they really did release
a board with a PCI interface, but I had heard something about this
anyway. Worst case, if there are no PCI GeForce boards (or none for
an unnacceptable period of time for you to wait) then I would go for
one of the recent Voodoo boards. I have heard people mention the
Matrox boards a lot on other discussions with XFree 4.0, but I have
no personal experience with those, so I don't know how they compare.
You could also go with one of the higher end Linux solutions involving
a commercial X-server. I think Evans & Sutherland's boards have some
OpenGL support for Linux now, and they are known to be pretty speedy,
although I can't say whether they are PCI or just AGP-only.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 01:36:28PM -0400, Michael Galloway wrote:
> hmmm ...
>
> this box, based on the intel SC450NX mainboard does not have an AGP slot. i
> cannot seem to locate a PCI based GeForce board. any know if it comes in PCI?
>
> -- michael
>
>
> On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, John Stone wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi,
> > My own suggestion for getting the most bang for the buck with running
> > VMD on a Linux box is to get one of the GeForce 256, or GeForce 2 GTS boards.
> > We have had some great results with ours so far, and VMD (unlike most games)
> > is extremely well suited to taking advantage of the hardware T&L on the
> > GeForce boards. The hardware T&L gives the GeForce a big advantage over
> > the other boards we've tried so far. The Voodoo boards are probably
> > the next best choice, although they lack hardware T&L, and would be much
> > more dependant on main CPU speed. I have no experience with the "xig"
> > software you mention below, but we have been using XFree 4.0 with
> > success, and intend to keep using that on the Linux boxes that some of
> > our group's scientists use.
> >
> > Thanks for using VMD!
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> 

-- 
Theoretical Biophysics Group   Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Beckman Institute              http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/
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