Ogre Forums

Hello guys,

I'm trying to get specs for a new PC. I'm looking at NVIDIA GTX980 to use with OGRE for real-time rendering. I was thinking to ask this in a more hardware related site, but since I use OGRE and I do development, I found that this may be a better place. I was thinking to place this in general, but I guess is more appropriate in Lounge/Off-Topic.

I'm getting a video card that could support up to 4 video cards, but I don't foresee adding more than 2. Actually, I will start only with one. Something I'm been wanting to do is get stereoscopic rendering .

My question is that NVIDIA GTX980 has so many vendors, EVGA, ASUS, GIGABYTE, ....... that I'm not sure if it makes a difference. For example, I always notice that EVGA has a better price that others... how do they differ?

Also, when you compared the next line after GEFORCE, which is QUADRO (I think) or in the case of AMD is the FIREPRO, I think the price that one pays does not make a difference for real-time rendering (as in games). I have a computer with a FIREPRO and it works great of course with OGRE, as ogre works well even with low-end video cards (I think), but I had always wonder if the fire pro I had was worth the money, when you can have a much capable gamer's type of card for the same objective.


I would be very happy to hear your comments, experiences, and feedback, to see which card to get.

Thanks

Well I was reading a thread the other day and they mentioned several companies get them all manufactured by the same people

They are built by PC Partner for us, using NVIDIA BGA board, Samsung memory so all NVIDIA spec components.

PC partner build Sapphire, Zotac, PNY, Manli, Inno3D so are probably the worlds biggest manufacturer of cards.

From thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showth ... t=18629271

I have a card made by Palit (GTX 770 4Gb) never had a problem with it. What I noticed most when looking at different cards is they overclock at different ratios memory/gpu so I think it comes down to the cooling technology they use more to get that extra speed (more speed more they charge). So I think with a GTX980 it won't really matter too much who you go with

With the fire pro/quadro type cards I though these were more targeted at 3d designers no gamer would usually get one as there is no point.

Now one thing to consider is cooling requirements if you plan on getting 2 or more GPUs get a case suited to it. I just use air cooling / water cooling (cpu) in a corsair carbide case (http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/carbide-se ... -cube-case) never have a problem on cpu or gpu. I don't overclock the gpu though cpu I have it set to auto clock to 4.6ghz max

Dont bother with quadro/firepro cards for gaming. They have more memory which is ECC and will not give you any decent benefit at least not considering the absurd cost! As for individual suppliers it does not really matter. The only difference is the cooler attached. For NVIDIA cards, especially the new 900 series, it really should not matter as they run so cool anyway! However AMD cards run hotter and therefore may hit thermal throttling with a poor cooler, I dont know much about AMD cards but this was an issue in a recent card (not sure which one)

I've been using EVGA for a while, and I'm happy. Currently have 3x EVGA 980's (Tri-SLI). They are great cards.

Don't bother with professional cards unless you actually need them for work. In some cases they will actually give you *worse* performance in games.

I've had good luck using the Nvidia 3D Vision glasses and their driver. It works pretty decent out-of-box with OGRE, though to really customize it you will eventually want to code your own stereo render.

Thank you all.

What would it take to get the stereo render?

Thanks

cybereality wrote:I've been using EVGA for a while, and I'm happy. Currently have 3x EVGA 980's (Tri-SLI). They are great cards.

Don't bother with professional cards unless you actually need them for work. In some cases they will actually give you *worse* performance in games.

I've had good luck using the Nvidia 3D Vision glasses and their driver. It works pretty decent out-of-box with OGRE, though to really customize it you will eventually want to code your own stereo render.

I have always had systems only with one card. What is the gain that you have experience with having two or three cards? Can you give me some examples

Thanks,
Francisco

I forgot to post the thread on my PC build last year http://ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php? ... 5&p=492908. Not had a single performance issue and not dropped a second card in yet. I deliberately went 8 core amd as I wanted to align with the new consoles hardware.

@iblues1976: For a stereo renderer you basically take 2 cameras (from slightly apart) and 2 viewports and combine them in some way. For a traditional SBS (side-by-side) 3D system you can just map them directly to the screen. That part it fairly straight-forward. The more complex part is getting the projection matrix math correct, usually you want an off-axis frustum to avoid distortion in the image. In addition, if you are using Nvidia glasses on a 120/144Hz monitor, then you would need to integrate with the NV API. I haven't got this far yet, but I believe it's just a matter of "tagging" the left/right render targets in a way the driver can deal with them. And, of course, this may affect portability if you are building cross-platform. Otherwise you can use quad-buffer OpenGL but the hardware support is not as robust as with Nvidia 3D Vision on Windows.

In terms of SLI, I would not do this unless you really need to. You can improve performance this way, but even with 3 cards you won't get 3x performance boost. In my case, I am running 3D Vision Surround at 7680x1440, and even 3x 980's struggle with high settings in modern games. If you are just using a single monitor at 1440p (or less) then you can probably stick with 1 980 and be OK. If you are getting into 4K, multi-monitor, and other exotic things then sometimes the extra boost can make a difference. The other downside is that SLI may require profiles (from Nvidia) so new or obscure games may not work well. For example, Watch_Dogs has horrible SLI scaling, and you actually get better performance by disabling the secondary card. Not only that, but there is additional latency (lag) associated with AFR (alternate frame rendering) and issues with micro-stutter, so even when FPS seems higher on SLI a single card may deliver a smoother feeling experience.

So it may be best to get one 980 to start with, and then upgrade if you feel performance is not where you need.

Any monitor recommendations (27 inches or greater) for 144 refresh rate