
Today's mainstream graphics card market is dominated by products containing Nvidia's GeForce chip, the TNT2 Ultra, the G400 series from Matrox and ATI's Rage 128 cards. In our last 3D graphics test we left out one topic: What is actually going on in the OpenGL workstation area?
Professional graphics artists or engineers use hardly any of the graphics chips mentioned above. And this situation is not really improving because of poor support, insufficient driver support for high-end applications and missing functionality. One reason for the poor support are the steadily dwindling profit margins in the last three years. High volumes are the only way to profitability for manufacturers in the mainstream segment. Long gone are the times when workstation PCs sold for 50 000 US-$. This price erosion did not stop at professional OpenGL cards. Currently the 'sweet spot' is just below 1000 Dollars. Granted, there are still very expensive OpenGL computing monsters out there, but the number of shipped products over 1000 Dollars is relatively small.
Today's 'sweet spot customers' demand decent performance, stability for many applications, and of course better support than it is usually the case for mainstream cards. In the following comparison we tested five OpenGL cards for less than 1000 Dollars. Initially we were surprised when only the Diamond Fire GL 1 Pro, Evans & Sutherland Lightning 1200, Elsa Gloria II and 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 fitted in this price category we selected. 3Dlabs asked us to also test the GVX210 that at almost 2000 Dollars is far above our specification. However, because of its interesting features we decided to include it in our test nevertheless.
- Introduction
- Driver Direction For OpenGL Cards
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 - DFP- And Stereo Connectors
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 - Display Characteristics
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1 - PowerThreads
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210 - Display Characteristics
- 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210 - Dual-Monitor-Operation
- Diamond Fire GL 1 Pro
- Diamond Fire GL 1 Pro - Display Characteristics
- Diamond Fire GL 1 Pro - 3DSM Plugin
- Evans & Sutherland Lightning 1200
- E & S Lightning 1200 - Display Characteristics
- Elsa Gloria II With Nvidia's Quadro-Chip
- Elsa Gloria II - Display Characteristics
- Elsa And The Driver Problems
- Elsa Drivers - The Bad News
- Quality Problems
- Table Of Features
- The Test Platforms
- Test Procedure
- 3D Studio Max 3.1 R3 Benchmark
- 3D Studio Max 3.1 R3 Benchmark, Continued
- 3D Studio Max 3.1 R3 Benchmark, Continued
- SPECapc Solidworks 99 Benchmark
- SPECopc SPECviewperf 6.1.1
- SPECopc SPECviewperf 6.1.1, Continued
- Fogcity
- Recommendations And Resume
- Pros And Cons