ATI Radeon redraw errors

[Thomas Wingate]

Hello again.

 

built a brand new machine to do cad and programming on. picked out a Radeon card cos it was pretty good price compared to gforce or quadro.

have some redraw problems when doing vrification using true solid. dunno if this is a bug or related to the card. so far i have had no problems with any other apps on the card.

anyone else have similar experiences?

 

regards,

thomas w

[Matthew]

It has been my understanding since I started using CAD/CAM software that ATI cards do not work well for these applications. Althought what is usually recommended is to make sure you have the latest drivers, and turn down the acceleration bar under display properties/settings/advanced/troubleshooting.

[Kenneth Potter]

Your ATI card is JUNK!......Dump it ....do a forum search about ATI cards ...... good luck

[cadcam]

Thomas W I do not sugest this Gamers card by any means.

I suggest the 3D Labs VX1 card right form the company.

Link to the site to buy and the price.

 

Get this card set it to Solid works setting works great.

[Bullines]

Most people on this forum will say that cards from ATI are inferior cards. This statement is simply not true. ATI makes some great cards but unfortunately their drivers up to this point have always had poor OpenGL implementations. As it stands as of V9, Mastercam uses OpenGL for various graphics routines. Which Radeon model do you have? Have you considered any of the Radeon tweaking utilities available on the Internet, such as R3DTweak, as an interim solution?

[cadcam]

Well one of my thoughts is to say how this game goes with the Release Of V9.1.

[Bullines]

quote:

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Well one of my thoughts is to say how this game goes with the Release Of V9.1.

---

Although the Radeon is considered a "game" card, it is still a very powerful card, except with OpenGL applications. Yes, even with OpenGL games it behaves eratically. ATI's drivers have always favored DirectX instead of OpenGL and it doesn't look like that'll change soon.

[cadcam]

I guess I was missinformed then.

[Thomas Wingate]

okok,

 

Im gonna be more specific blame my boss for the purcase. he got the card prior to the machine to me assembling the machine and now i have to deal with it.

 

the ogl implementation in the ati drivers is **** , i know.

but the card in it self is by no means **** . you do get a lot of polygons for the money but not very good lines, culling and healing with gamescards. pro cards tend to be pretty expensive if you want the same poly push.

 

anyone of you using nvidias quadro cards?

 

ltr,

thomas w

[gcode]

I'm using an Elsa Synergy 3 card which uses the

Quadro chipset. I'm had no trouble running MC or SW on this card.

I also use a Dell laptop with an ATI card.

I had some redraw problems, but fixed them by deleting a couple of dll files from the MC folder.

 

I can't remeber which ones they were, but a search of this fourm should find their names.

I learned that trick here.

 

[ 06-24-2002, 09:08 AM: Message edited by: gcode ]

[RandyN]

We have a geforce3 and a quadro2 in our 2 seats of v9sp1, and both work great.

[Rick Damiani]

I've got a Quadro card in my workstation in the office, but spend most of my 'quality time' with MasterCAM on my notebook, which has an Nvidia Gforce2 GO board. Both of them work like a champ.

 

My companie's training lab is all equipped with Nvidia Gforce2MX boards which are cheap, trouble free, and offer decent performance. Nvidia makes some great stuff in the low-cost, high performance area, as does 3D Labs. I've not had a bad experence with any boards from either company. I can't say the same thing about ATI.

[Greg Williams]

My IT guy has recomended that I get a new pc (about time too), He has quoted a Quadro2 pro graphics card with win2000 pro. Has anyone here had any problems with this setup, I will be running Mcam V9 and Solidworks. Thanks for your help on this never ending question.

[gcode]

That setup should work very well for both MC and SW.

[Thomas Wingate]

hello again

 

nvidia do make some really exellent drivers. my programmer friends in the games industry keep telling me that they are really impressive work in general.

my home machine has a geforce card and i have never had any problems with it with either MC or Ironcad. Softimage has given me some crashes sometimes but then soft is pretty picky in the ogl implementation.

 

judgeing from all the replies the verdict must be: stay away from ati for pro work.

 

thankyou,

thomas w

[Bullines]

You are indeed correct. nVidia's drivers are some of the best in the business. And the top-of-the-line of latest GeForce cards, the 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4600, is actually better than any of their Quadro (ahem, non-gamer) cards. The GeForce 4 Ti 4600 is really the best video card available right now, including both gamer cards and high-end cards (Ex: Oxygen). Now I'm not saying they are the best choice for Mastercam. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I don't know since I haven't been fortunate enough to even be in the same room as a computer with one of those cards. I have found that previous GeForce (minus MX versions) cards do perform very well, so far. All I'm saying is that no matter what anybody says, as of this very moment, cards based on the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 chipset are simply the most technologically superior cards. Period. They are pricey at this point, though.

[Thomas Wingate]

the geforce cards are great except fot that they are mainly texel/mapped polygon/culling accellerators. the 4ti does some really good antialiasing. the fail a bit when it comes to wireframe and antialiased lines.

you notice this if you swich from texturemapped mode to wireframe and move the camera around. wireframe is a lot slower.

quadro has added support for wireframe.

 

thomas w

[Bullines]

If Mastercam contains any antialiasing work, be it from an algorithm like Wu or via OpenGL calls to glEnable() passing it GL_POINT_SMOOTH or GL_LINE_SMOOTH, I haven't seen it in action. By default, nVidia's Detonator drivers give antialiasing control to the given app. If the app doesn't have any antialiasing abilities, you can let the drivers try to take over the duties as seen in the screenshot below:

 

 

No guarantees, though. I don't work for nVidia

[Thomas Wingate]

yeah. i know this stuff and it works well to force the AA for both catia and ironcad.

 

the initial post was about ati radeon 7500 thou, which doesnt seem to do a very good job of the ogl api calls from MC.

 

the quadro seems to be the better choice.

 

thomas w

[Bullines]

quote:

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the quadro seems to be the better choice.

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We went a little OT, but yes, I couldn't agree more

[cadcam]

quote:

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And the top-of-the-line of latest GeForce cards, the 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4600,

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Got one today so fare it is a rocken card.

I will let you know if you want as I do more with it.

[Thomas Wingate]

ok guys, lets kill this topic afore it gets all bloated

 

geforce 4 ppl: please post if you run into troubble!

 

tw