[benbaur]

Can openGL speed up rendering in Bryce 4 ?

XPert 128 Rage Fury Base AGP 16 128bit
Good for 3D app ?

and what Card is the Best for Photoshop 5;FreeHand;Microsoft PhotoDraw;Poser;Bryce4

[samdragon]

open GL is for display purposes only, it speeds up work flow, working with shaded objects instead of wireframe, and some cards also have texture memory to help you display textures on your shaded objects.
Rendering is pretty much all processor and memory. Some programs use hardware rendering that will make use of the card to render out quick things.
I can only speak for apps like softimage and Maya. Other 3d apps may have a different setup and use different open GL.
You pretty much have different levels of open gl cards, ranging from entry level ($200) to highend($5000-6000). Don't get open gl confused with the open GL in game cards,It's a whole different thing.
IF you want more (certainly accurate)info look here:
http://www.opengl.org/


[This message has been edited by samdragon (edited May 26, 2000).]

[sfr]

Actually, OpenGL for games is the same thing as OpenGL for pro 3d apps. Sure, there are some features that 3d software can make use of that games don't need, but good OpenGL performance with games indicates that the chip would have potential with 3d apps as well.

From there on, it's a question of drivers mostly - companies like 3Dlabs have traditionally had much better (more complete, more stable, with those "pro" features supported) OpenGL drivers than game 3d accelerator makers. NVidia has pretty much changed this though; the performance of their Geforce beats many of the $1000-class OpenGL accelerators of just a few years ago. It's sort of amusing that Geforce's T&L, aka geometry acceleration, was so hyped for games when its only real use until now has been with 3d apps.

Anyway, NVidia's normal OpenGL drivers are quite good, but since they're not ones to miss an excellent moneymaking opportunity, they have a variant of the Geforce called Quadro, which costs several times more and is aimed at the pro market. For the money spent on a Quadro rather than a regular Geforce, you get a 5 MHz chip clock increase, 32 megs more memory, and somewhat improved drivers which support a couple of OpenGL features intentionally missing from the normal Geforce. Woohoo.

Saffron / Sunflower

[Frost]

Saffron: Hehe, good lengthy explanation. =)

Yeah, OpenGL is a graphics standard that is basically adopted and supported (up to a very workable degree) by most 3D applications, games, etc. It's only useful for polygonal based 3D - if Bryce (or any other app) does software rendering, it's pretty much useless. Not all that is 3D is accelerated or OpenGL, depends on the apps.

If you're using Maya, 3DS Max, etc, you can bet they use some OpenGL extensions for real-time 3D editing of geometry and such. Note that if this is what you need, make sure that both your software supports OpenGL accelerated T&L, and that your hardware can do T&L.

For all the other stuff, you need a card that's good and fast at 2D. Usually, all this boils down to an nVidia, Matrox, or ATI board.

[Mr Weasel]

Hm, actually OpenGL cards for games such as TNT, GeForce and the alikes are considered as 'low end' by 3D pros. The hi-ends would be the ones that are manufactured by Evans & Sutherland (Tornado), 3Dlabs (Oxygen GMX,RPM), etc.
The Rage Fury 128 card is a gaming card and it's meant for gaming puposes. But since your choice of softwares doesn't rely heavily on OpenGL, I think it's okay to use it.

[mrjoker]

Bryce does not use OpenGL at all. Rendering and visualization (on screen) is done through software.