What do you get when you upgrade to the modern advanced professional graphics cards? Aren't all graphics cards the same?
Not at all. Professional graphics cards offer features that we can leverage in EnSight, higher capacities, and professional graphics driver support.
Features of EnSight that are only supported on recent card architectures:
1) Volume rendering, including embedded transparent surfaces
2) Hardware accelerated object picking
3) Dynamic object highlighting
4) Per-pixel correct transparency sorting
5) Greatly improved transparency performance
6) Part coloring enhancements: Improved limit fringes, alpha palettes, etc
7) Independently rendered annotation plane
8) Customizable anti-aliasing
Features of workstation class cards:
1) Stereo display support
2) Faster, higher quality line drawing
3) Improved memory management and drivers
4) Multi-display support (e.g. a PowerWall or Cave in a single card).
More general benefits to EnSight, due to improved
graphics architectures and increased memory sizes:
1) Larger geometries can be manipulated in real-time
2) Rendering performance (often 2x improvement for each generation of graphics card)
Those are probably the biggest items. Not necessarily in the order that all people would agree about. The #1 issue is improved productivity as the user has:
a) Entirely new ways of looking at their data via Volume Rendering, Alpha Palettes, etc.
b) Improved direct interaction, resulting in fewer missteps
c) Improved interaction rates, allowing them to ask and formulate answers to more questions in the same amount
of time
What do you mean by "modern"?
When we talk about "modern" cards here we generally refer to cards that have at least DirectX 10 levels of functionality. Even if you are not on Windows and using DirectX 10, that level of graphics card is what we mean by modern.
Who makes "modern" graphics cards?
Look for nVidia Quadro lines and the AMD/ATI graphics cards.
Support page for AMD/ATI graphics cards certification is here.
Support page for nVidia graphics cards certification is here.
For further reading...
See our article on Virtual Reality (VR) on large display systems like Power Walls and CAVES.
*Stereo: On your desktop you can use local stereo displays for free:
- EnSight (any version, not actually free, but no additional cost)
- EnSight CFD Free (yes, there is a free version)
- EnLiten
- Reveal
- EnVE provides for for basic and batch video editing of movies in stereo format
- EnVideo for stereo video/movie/animation playback.
- Desktop stereo display requires the use of an graphics card configured to support OpenGL Quad-buffered stereo display. CEI tools will automatically detect the presence of such desktop stereo graphics setups and will enable various stereo playback options automatically.
The QuickTools are accessed through the user defined tools icon from the icon strip located below the main EnSight menu bar. If this icon is not available in your icon set, you can enable it using the “Modify and save icon layout…” button in the “General User Interface” preferences panel. When the icon is selected, the user defined tools panel is displayed. The panel is a collection of horizontal tabs and looks like this: 
