Gforce 7900GS vs ATI Fire GL 7100

[lambros]

Last year I bought a PCI-E Fire GL 7100 (at about 810 euros) which I used with the firegl special max driver. A week ago, my wife bought a new pc with a Gforce 7900GS (PCI-E too) at 210 euros. Well, I'll be damned, but the Gforce performs at twice the speed in max viewport than the Fire Gl does (Gforce runs on DirectX, while FireGL uses the special firegl driver). So, I just swaped cards with my wife.

Now, that is really weird, isn't it?

[DavidR]

I'll be damned, but the Gforce performs at twice the speed in max viewport than the Fire Gl does (Gforce runs on DirectX, while FireGL uses the special firegl driver). QUOTE]

 

We had 7 wkstations with FireGL-128 and had unacceptable performance and horrible support, then we got nVidia cards, and life is sweet. Ati is known to have crappy OGL drivers, wheras nVidia's OGL and DX work properly. BTW, Max works best using DX, especially in shaded -it's many times faster than OGL -I mention it because I'm not sure what FireGL Max driver is -try switching to DX to see if it helps. An ILM guy at Siggraph was saying that they can't use ATI because they cut corners in design so that some stuff that should be 32-bit is only 16-bit. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was a lighting seminar before ~200 people, so maybe someone remembers. Hopefully AMD will make ATI a better company, but for know, we've blacklisted them.

[lambros]

thx for the reply. Actually, the max optimized firegl driver is using opengl, and runs much faster than my previous Gforce 5950Ultra . My new Gforce 7900GS is slower than the ATI in wireframe modes, but I don't really care. I wonder how much faster the Gforce 7950 GTs would be (at 550 euros)

[DavidR]

Gforce 7900GS is slower than the ATI in wireframe modes,QUOTE]

 

I find OGL faster than DX in wireframe, but many many times slower in shaded. Max9 can display wireframe differently (hidden line), but I haven't enough experience with it to make any claims: Autodesk says it's way faster than wireframe with backface cull on (default).