Open GL Cards

[trekiej]

Hello.
I would like to get your opinion on OpenGL video cards.
Do you think they have better quality output than their game counterparts?
I know they can be expensive and usually do not have high frame rates compared to game oriented cards.
Has any company matched a card with a monitor for better quality?
Here is a possible dumb question.
In two chapters or less, how does a card have directx or opengl compatability?
Thanks.

[Aegis]

By 'OpenGL' I assume you're referring to Quadro/FireGL as opposed to GeForce/Radeon?

Both nVidia and AMD make cards/drivers optimized for OpenGL performance specifically for high-end DCC (Digital Content Creation) and CAD use - applications such as Maya/3DS Max/AutoCAD etc. can take advantage of these optimizations for better performance.

But for general computing - games, internet, office apps etc. those cards have little-to-no benefit (and cost considerably more than their 'gaming' counterparts).

And as to how a card can support both OpenGL and DirectX, - they're just API's (Application Programming Interface) - a programmer writes to the API and the driver implementation (either nVidia's or AMD's) tells the graphics hardware what to do - either can be used since they're both supported in the drivers.

[trekiej]

I wonder if the manufacture makes their own graphics engine in hardware and then has some sort of hardware interface that DirectX or OpenGL accesses. Maybe that is the acceleration part of a card. Creating a hardware function that replaces something that software would usually do is common.

I guess Blender 3D could use an OpenGL card's extra functionality. Since Linux does not use DirectX, I wonder if it uses all OpenGL functions or maybe just enough to run the game.
Thanks.

[spirantho]

This kind of sums up the differences fairly well:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10532978/difference-between-nvidia-quadro-and-geforce-cards

[Ilwrath]

I wonder if the manufacture makes their own graphics engine in hardware and then has some sort of hardware interface that DirectX or OpenGL accesses. Maybe that is the acceleration part of a card. Creating a hardware function that replaces something that software would usually do is common.

That's basically it.  OpenGL and DirectX are both essentially higher-level graphics languages.  The general idea is that the drivers take that language and feed it into code that can execute on the CPU and GPU to create the actual frame.  The more the drivers can offload to the GPU, the less the CPU has to do, and generally, the better the performance.  (Now, that's an incredibly high-level view, and could probably be nitpicked to death by implementation issues, but it's sufficient for a general idea...)

The Quadro/FireGL cards have drivers that are designed to be tightly integrated into CAD applications, therefore they show better performance on those types of benchmarks, and worse performance on gaming benchmarks.

Unless you need a CAD workstation, having a Quadro or FireGL is not much help, and may even be a rather expensive hindrance in your system, compared to their GeForce/Radeon counterparts.

[trekiej]

I have a mother board that has 760G chip set with HD3000 graphics.
I have had my eye on a FireGL V7700. It seems to be a HD 3870 equivalent.
edit:

[trekiej]

With Blender if I got to 1 to 4 million vertices it chugs. This is with a card that is not an OpenGL branded card that has up to 512MB and system ram of 4GB.
How do you think a V7700 would faire with 512 MB Ram?