Howdy

I finally realised that my five years old PC is by far too
weak to have fun with Houdini (

So I consider to upgrade. And here comes the question

While ATI consumer cards are not recommended for windows,
I wonder if this is true for Linux and MacOS, as well?


Cheers
botti

As far as I know nvidia is the recommended choice for Linux as well. And if you go mac you might want to consider installing Linux (or Windows) along OSX so better stick with nvidia.

Dragos

As far as I know, at least for Linux, nVidia is the way to go, they have the absolutely best drivers available for graphics card.
Check out their site to see what drivers are recommended and what cards they recommend for linux.

Hi guys,

this is what I have found so far on the ‘system requirements’
page, it only mentions pro-hardware

# Workstation-class OpenGL graphics card (such as NVidia and ATI)
# Graphic Card drivers NVidia 169 or higher, ATI 8.44 or higher

These days I use houdini for personal use only and can hardly afford
a higher class machine. And I need a machine that is more or less portable.

So the iMac 20" came to my mind (with ATI gfx)…
The model with Nvidia-gfx would be much higher in price.
Also mid-range notebooks are often build with ATI chips.

This is why I hope to get some positive answers…

Maybe somebody already tried it?

Cheers

EDIT I forgot to mention thx for your replies, guys

Hi

there's some HP laptops that come with nvidia graphics
a friend here at work got one of those, with a 17" in screen
in about $1000.

the other nice thing is it has 2 HDs, is the only laptop I've seen with 2 HDs
that's great, think of the possibilities.

I think is this one
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8779397&st=hp+laptop&lp=3&type=product&cp=1&id=1204332554359 [bestbuy.com]

and of course we put ubuntu linux on the thing and runs sweet, we also installed XP, very hard process to DOWNGRADE from vista, no freaking drivers, sata drives, a mess, but we did.

We've had pretty good experiences with ATI's on the Mac. There are two of us developing on ATI bases Macs at Side Effects at the moment (one iMac and one MacPro). With 10.5.4, they seem very good (there were issues earlier). Although, we are developers and don't push the machines as hard graphically on a daily basis as you would.

Conversely, we are trying to track down an issue with NVidia on the Mac where text fields aren't always updating correctly. The ATI machines are fine.

These sorts of things can change with each OS update…. We'll do our best to keep things working:-)

MikeTaylor
Conversely, we are trying to track down an issue with NVidia on the Mac where text fields aren't always updating correctly. The ATI machines are fine.

I've seen this too, haven't reported it yet, but is this where you are trying to type into a parameter and the cursor seems to lag behind what you are inputting by one character, its really awkward to work with.

ATI/AMD (or DAAMIT if you want) have improved their linux drivers recently. You could check out www.phoronix.com for reviews etc. They just released some new ones.