Well now I’m all paranoid.
I am building a computer desktop unit piecemeal and I want to get SketchUp Pro to run on it, but I was told my choice of video card is no good.
The components of the machine so far are:
Can anyone tell me whether I will have driver issues with this setup or am I worrying for nothing?
Thanks.
You can do a search of “AMD” on this forum to get a feel of what may happen with that card. Some people with naughty drivers tested out older drivers and reported back on which driver worked for them.
I don’t know why AMD has such a spotty record on developing drivers with real, 100% OpenGL support. Apple develops the drivers for Macs using AMD cards and those machines don’t have the issues experienced on Window machines.
I’ve tried that and it seemes that it’s a moderately unlikely problem?
Also, what are ‘naughty’ drivers?
I’m not a hardware hacker or anything; I don’t plan to overclock or anything stupid like that. The most edgy thing I’m gonna do is run 32GB RAM in the thing.
Overclocking (although that’s not bad), edgy things as you see them don’t factor here. The issue is whether or not you will have the OpenGL function that SU requires. OpenGL is the name for particular set of ~300 some function calls. Graphic chipset manufacturers add those functions to the drivers that run on the cards that use their chipset. All to often some of the less popular functions are left out of some drivers.
AMD seems to focus on video game market which doesn’t require 100% OpenGL support so things that aren’t required for most of their customers can be left out of the driver. In those cases, programs that require OpenGL may have performance issues if the program tries to use hardware acceleration - like not opening, saving files, and other performance issues.
SU can operate sole with the CPU doing all the work. In that case, hardware acceleration is disable. But that can come at the cost of speed on larger models - like your bridge. Graphics cards can supply very focused OpenGL processing with it’s onboard RAM - up to 3000x more efficient than just using the CPU and onboard RAM. It would be nice if you can get it, and that depends on the driver giving it to the card for you to use.
Well, my bridge model was created on a somewhat inferior system. It has been lagging since like March on this thing, so no big loss.
If I have to disable hardware acceleration, so be it.
I’ll e-mail AMD and ask them.
Thank you.
Or just assemble your system, install the latest driver and see what happens. You can get the older drivers from the AMD site if any issues pop up.
E-mail sent; we’ll see what happens.
I intend to proceed with my planned components.
My search on “Radeon R7” brings up more users having issues with the R7 series than I’d feel comfortable with, if I had one myself.
Hi there.
Yeah I did that search too, and my glimmer of hope is that nobody has posted about my specific card.
I suppose the worst case scenario is that I buy another GPU, but I’m loathe to waste another couple hundred dollars on an nVidia…