Re: Croquet speed

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 03:47:55PM -0500, David A. Smith wrote:
> > Remember to run in 32 bit color. This is because we utilize a stencil 
> > buffer for portals and most graphics cards don't seem to support this in 
> > hardware except in 32 bit. What happens instead is they resort to software 
> > rendering for anything viewed through a portal. This means that a mirror 
> > will render the scene once in HW and again in SW. VERY bad. Of course, the 
> > software engines are extremely poor - but that's not their business. I am 
> > looking at alternatives based upon the z-buffer.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried this on a more workstation grade
> setup than a Quadro4?  I wish the admin hadn't pulled all the Wildcat
> cards from the lab.  I found that while games might be nicer on other
> cards, the wildcats seemed to hold up better to badly optimized loads.

I doubt the graphics board is the bottleneck at this point.  A Quadro4
will do just fine. I could run it on some Wildcats or FireGLs, but why
bother? Get a CPU as fast as you can, then anything from GeForce up will
do. Actually I'd guess *any* 3D accelerator will do, as long as it has 
hardware stencil and not too crappy GL drivers. Anybody with 2 GHz and a 
TNT or onboard graphics?

-- Bert