hi,
Look at http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html .
All their cards support OpenGL (even on linux). The prices range from $50 to perhaps several $1000's (or even 10000's?) if you want state of the art. An old GeForce or TNT model should be cheap if you can find a vendor. 150$ should be good enough to play most of the newest games (on a modern pc).
LabVIEW actually uses the Mesa (http://www.mesa3d.org/) library, which is close related to OpenGL. I'm still not absolutely sure if Mesa benefits from hardware acceleration without recompiling the mesa source or something (it is open source). You might want to investigate before buying a card (please let us know).
Regards,
Wiebe.
"tarheel_hax0r" <x@no.email> wrote in message news:180382@exchange.ni.com...
In another thread about running recent versions of LabVIEW on older hardware, someone mentioned that LabVIEW uses OpenGL for its graphics engine [which would make sense, because there's no such thing as DirectX for Linux or Sparc/Solaris or whatever]. This got me to thinking about the question of affordable graphics cards with good OpenGL acceleration that meshes well with LabVIEW.<br><br>Unfortunately, when I went to Google on OpenGL hardware reviews, the hits that I got were rather old [by video card standards]:<br><blockquote><br><b>OpenGL Accelerators Reviewed</b><br>January 2, 2002<br><a target="_blank" href="http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000267">http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000267</a><br><br><b>OpenGL 3D Graphics Boards</b><br>Parts I, II, and III<br>May 21, 2002<br><a target="_blank" href="http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,2533,a=27193,00.asp">http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,2533,a=27193,00.asp</a><br><br><b>Graphics Boosters For OpenGL Workstations</b><br>September 16, 2003<br><a target="_blank" href="http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030916/index.html">http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030916/index.html</a><br></blockquote><br>This leads me to believe that hardware manufacturers have pretty much abandoned the pursuit of any latent OpenGL market in favor of DirectX.<br><br>So does anyone know of an "affordable" graphics card with stable drivers that mesh well with LabVIEW's OpenGL graphics engine [maybe $50-$150, but certainly no more than about $250]?<br><br>Dual monitor support is pretty much a requirement, but I fear that [true, onboard] dual RAMDACs might be asking for a little too much, at least in this price range.<br><br>PS: There's a real nice, fairly recent summary of [true] dual RAMDAC cards here:<br><blockquote><br><a target="_blank" href="http://www.processor.com/articles/P2608/07p08/07p08charts.pdf">http://www.processor.com/articles/P2608/07p08/07p08charts.pdf</a><br><b>WARNING: PDF DOCUMENT</b><br></blockquote><br>Thanks!
