I configure at the moment a new pc for fluent/gambit (linux), and I'm not sure, which graphics card is the right one for this. We think, elsa synergy 2000, synergy II or synergy III should be ok (???). What do you think ? Do you have experience with those cards ? And what do you think about an elsa gladiac 920 (even it seems to be more a card for games...)?

Thanks a lot

christof

My experience is that elsa synergy II is OK.

What is your budget? Ok, some of the prices are out of date, but this should help you with your choice. Here is what CAD users at http://www.cadalyst.com found (higher test results are better):

3dLabs Wildcat II 5110: Best performance of any card currently available at $2000,

ATI Fire GL2, test result: 52.6 at $1200,

ELSA GLoria III, test result: 38.4 at $1200,

Oxygen GVX420, test result: 29.1 at $2500,

Oxygen GVX210, test result: 28.2 at $2000 (old price),

3dLabs Wildcat 4110, test result: 26.7 at $2200 (old price),

ELSA GLoria II, test result: 24.9 at $700 (old price),

ATI Fire GL1, test result: 23.8 at $700 (old price),

E&S Tornado 3000, test result: 19.2 at $1300 (old price),

ATI Radeon32, test result: 17.9 at $279,

Matrox G400, test result: 15.6 at $210 (old price).

Now I'll try to compare some of the ELSA cards on your list:

ELSA Gloria III: 31 million polygons per second, over 1 billion texture-mapped pixels per second, fill rate of up to 6.4 Gigabyte per second.

ELSA Synergy III: 25 million polygons per second, 400 million texture-mapped pixels per second, fill rate with close to 3 GB/second.

ELSA Synergy 2000: 20 million polygons per second, 350 million texture-mapped pixels per second, memory bandwidth of 2.7 GB/second.

ELSA Gladiac 920: This is a GeForce3 model, made for games. GeForce3 is by far the fastest gaming card available. ELSA won't list the same specs so this is the best guess I can make: The Gladiac 920 should perform about the same as the ELSA Gloria III.

source for the comparison - http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic...13/gl2-14.html (note the Quadro2 Pro is the same as an ELSA Gloria III and the GeForce2 GTS is about half the speed of a GeForce3) Thus double the scores of the GeForce2 GTS, and you come up with performance quite similar to the ELSA Gloria III.

Ok now with my experience. I upgraded from an ELSA Gloria (the first model) to a Fire GL2 based on price and performance benchmarks. My Fluent and Gambit renders are an average of 5.2 times as fast. Your decision depends on: 1) how much are you willing to spend, 2) how much time do you wait for the graphics to be displayed, 3) how much is your time worth. To me a good card was well worth the money (but I didn't want to spend $2000 for the Wildcat).