OpenGL- AND game-card in one system (?) 1

[pietje]

I am preparing to build a new system for home use.
I would like to be able to run SW on this new system for the sporadic days that I am fed up with the office ) , but I also want to play the occasional 3D shooter to for example get rid of all my frustrations after one of those less successful SW sessions (due to myself or SW).

I have done a little research on OpenGL and SW...

The problem is that the OpenGL cards are not really up to the 3D game task (except when you buy a really expensive one, has anyone got experience with gaming on a OpenGL card btw??), and the game cards aren't really fit for SW.

I have spoken to and read stories from several people who use SW with a conventional game card and not even really high-performance models; the only difference I can see with my quadro fx560 at work is that the realtime views look a little bit less slick. And sometimes SW puts itself in software OpenGL mode, which is disastrous for performance.

When you use a high-performance game card, can you expect an exceptable performance from SW?? I don't really mind the realtime viewing being less slick, but find it important that SW doesn't slow down significantly or craps up the views. And what to do to override/prevent SW using software opengl mode??
(i know about the certified cards on the SW site!)

Motherboards nowadays can have two PCI-e slots. All info I can find is about SLI with two identical cards. But could it be that, for example, in the Bios you can select which card to use for the next computersession? This combined with two installations of windows (normal use and SW use).


Hope some of u can advise me..

 

[Luca83]

Oh yeah thats can also screw things up, I try to keep AA and AF settings at the game option level rather than at the windows driver level.

Glad it worked out for you!!!

Dell Precision 690
Xeon 5345 2.33Ghz Quad
Quadro FX4600 FW91.36
SW2008 Premium SP1.1 x64 - Rhino 4.0

 

[Mindnumb]

I have used a ati radeon 9800 pro card for some years in my home computer. I set up the pc with dualboot, and softmodded the card to FireGl for the work version.
This can be done with some newer cards, but I think the Geforce4 series is the last ones from Nvidia, but for ATI/AMD its possible with radeon 2900xt, that would make it a FireGL V8600.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=237273&highlight=firegl

The prosess can be somewhat tedious, but you get great value for your hardware.

Best of luck!

PS: some people have done the reversed thing, modding a Firegl or Quadro card back to its gaming sibling.... but I think that does not make much sense for you if you are going to be using this PC mainly for gaming.

 

[pietje]

I've read about that. And you're right about that it is not possible with my card. Oh well, knowing myself i would probably screw up the card during the process anyway

 

[kimocal]

I have an EVGA 8800GTS 640MB and did the soft mod on it. Realview works now and it's sweet! The mod only took me 5 minutes too The 8800GTS is now seen as a Quadro 4600 AND I don't have artifacting when it was a 8800GTS in SW2k8. To top it off it still plays Crysis (the single player demo) very smooth with all settings at high.

For REF I have a Quadcore Q6700 overclocked to 3.0 GHz per core and running 4 Gigs of Mushkin DDR2 Ram on an Abit IP35-PRO with WinXP64.

I just need to figure out how to setup a boot screen to be able to switch between CAD and Gaming mode like Mindnumb mentioned. But if it can play Crysis fine the way it is then no real need to do that.

 

[pietje]

...... wow.... really??

These are some of the threads i've read on the topic:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=215588

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=220942

All i can find is people saying that Nvidia locked the newer cards to prevent performing a successful mod, or that it works but not in programs like SW.
Could you post some more on what you have done exactly to make it work (in only 5 minutes)? You've made me really curious, moreso since you have the same card I have (8800GTS G80 , not the newer G92).

looking forward to your reply

 

[kimocal]

I previously knew about it with the earlier GeForce and ATI cards and was hoping that it would be possible when I bought my video card and current computer setup (August '07). At the time it wasn't so I began looking around again recently. I came across a SWUG Forum page where the person had success soft-modding their 8800GTX based upon the instructions from a sidefx.com link. I then just followed the directions in the links. The first post in the sidefx.com link forum is basically all the directions you need. Here's the link for the Riva Tuner app.

Here's a generic breakdown of what I did.
-Downloaded the latest Quadro drivers from nVidia
-Uninstall the Geforce 8800 drivers
-Restart the comp
-Follow the directions from the sidefx.com forum page (NVstrap). There's a couple restarts involved here. I chose Quadro 4600 during these steps.
-Restart the comp
-Open up SW2k8 and enable RealView
-After checking out Realview start up Crysis and play.

I don't have the full version of Crysis just the demo. That game is also very dependent on your system (CPU, memory, hard drive, etc) and not just your video card.

Let me know if that helps.

 

[pietje]

you are forgetting step 1: generate image of system



This sounds like a nice project for the weekend. From what I've read on the houdini-forum, it should be pretty simple indeed, the more because I know I should be aiming for modding towards a FX4600. Hope it doesn't matter i do not have a EVGA card though.

Ooh, can't wait to try... thanx beforehand for the instructions and links Kim. If this works you'll end up on my hero-list for sure.

itmt, setting up a dualboot (geforce and quadro) should not be difficult. Just install XP two times on different partitions. If all has gone well, you will be able to choose during startup which of the two versions you want to use. ('generate a system image first' is also very applicable here). There are also some third-party bootmanagers that can achieve this for you, but I don't know the exact benefits of doing it that way. Google will find you several how-to's and what-not-to-do's on this subject.

more later on my softmod-attempt

 

[kimocal]

you are forgetting step 1: generate image of system

Like a backup? Oh that's done automatically once every two days with Acronis. I've lost too much before to not have a backup system. Especially running a RAID 0 + RAID 5 array now it's mandatory :

No need for a weekend project. It really only takes 5 minutes not including the computer startup times from the restarts.

The 4600 equivalent for this card does work. Card Brand doesn't really matter since they're all made by one company and then a brand name is slapped on the board (for ~90% of them I guess). If you wanted to make it a 3600 Quadro you would need a 8800GT (G92) 512MB since those two cards are the same on the hardware level. It's an easily reversible process since it's all done through the software and not the hardware. The 4600 is the closest equivalent to the 8800 GTS 640MB even though the 4600 has 768 MB. I haven't had any issues memory wise yet.

My comp runs 24/7 and so far it's been stable for the 3 months I've had it this way.

Cheers and let me know how it goes.

PS - The name is James. Kimo is Hawaiian for James (or so I've been told) and Cal is for CA, where I live. Sacramento to be exact.

 

[pietje]

James, you are now officialy on my HERO list.

If you had not posted that the softmodding could work for my card, I would have stuck to the opinions of other users that it doesn't work.

The process is slightly different from what you stated:
1. make sure you have installed the drivers for your card (you said you have to uninstall the Geforce drivers first, but if you do that, Riva Tuner won't be able to be of any help.. at least with me)
2. run rivatuner and setup nvstraps to the right model (as shown in the link you provided)
3. after reboot install the latest quadro drivers (went a little messy, because windows was convinced it had newer drivers. Have to look at this again, because I am missing the GL settings in the Nvidia-settings. Maybe something went wrong here)

After having done this I started up SW and was amazed. Realview was ON and everything went much, MUCH more smoother, like drawing or rotating and zooming the model!!! It really is a big difference.

This is just silly. The 4600 costs more than 5 times the money I have spent on my 8800GTS.
Probably they increase the costs because they have to make drivers suitable for professional use (so they have to be very stable, maybe more than the geforce) and smear out the costs over a relatively small group of buyers. But they may be overdoing it a little bit, I can't check their balancesheets though...

Again, many thanx to you, James. If I'll get stability issues i'll inform the group. Also later on I will look at the performance difference in 3d gaming using the 8800GTS drivers or the FX4600 drivers. If there is any I'll setup a dual-boot of XP, one for normal use and one for SW use.

Greetz Pete (that's english for Piet )

 

[storm76]

Hello Everyone,
I'm not sure why everyone is having issues with 3D image rendering (zoom,rotate,etc..). I think if a mediocre system is set up properly SW works fine. I have a 2.5 year old laptop with no problems.

HP Pavilion zv6000, XP Pro sp.2 (resources and systems settings tweaked), AMD Athlon 64 3200+ , ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200, 2GB RAM.

I'm not sure if your OS's have many unneccesary resources running, or too many TSR programs running to cause delays in running.

For those of you whom are running stand alone versions with XP, what i would recommend trying is create a users just for SW,
then turn of any unneccesary resources and use msconfig and disable all start-up programs, reboot and login using the new user. Now that SW has more breathing room try to run one of the larger files that have given you problems and see if this helps.