Please Note - Pages are now obsolete
Approximate translation of the Nemetschek FAQ guide to grapics cards to use with Allplan
at 11th February 2003.
copyright Nemetschek AG.

Document: http://www.nemetschek.de/de/service/faq.nsf/link/NT00001C5E.html

Processing status: 11.02.2003 product:

Graphics board recommendation for Allplan

Question: Which graphics cards can be used by Allplan?

Answer: Since there are very many different graphics boards and manufacturers in the market, it is not possible for us to recommend individual graphics cards for CAD use.
However, due to positive experiences we recommend the use of graphics boards which are based on graphic chips by manufacturer Nvidia (http://www.nvidia.com) for Allplan.

The following manufacturers use exclusively or almost exclusively Nvidia Graphic chips: Abit, Asus, Chaintech, Creative, Gainward, Leadtek, MSI, Sparkle

In the following list of the graphic chips by Nvidia you can find suitable graphics cards of the OEM manufacturers mentioned.

If you make sure with these cards that an OpenGL driver is offered, as it is by Nvidia (detonator driver), and is installed.
If the driver of the card manufacturer does not support OpenGL, then the Nvidia reference driver can be used, which is made available on the Nvidia homepage under http://www.nvidia.com.

Graphic chips by Nvidia:

Quadro4 * (900XGL, 750XGL, 700XGL, 550XGL)

Quadro2 * (ex, MXR, pro)

GeForce4 * (Ti 4600, Ti 4400, MX 460, MX 440, MX 420)

GeForce3 * (Ti 500, Ti 200)

GeForce2 (Ti, pro, Ultra, MX, GTS, GeForce 256)

TNT2 (pro, M64, Ultra, TNT2)

* = recommended graphic chips for visualisation and animation.

Other recommendable graphic cards: 3DLabs Wildcat 5000 *, 3DLabs Wildcat 5110 *
(WS note- Wildcat III 6110 also works OK in my experience
but I have heard of problems with the new 3D Labs Wildcat VP range)

Note: The graphic cards of the manufacturers ATI, Elitegroup and Matrox are operated with drivers by manufacturers that were not tested by us. In the direct animation in Allplan, based on OpenGL, these cards have every now and then problems.

OpenGL: The real time animation (animation window universal model or - element selection) in Allplan uses OpenGL as hardware acceleration.
DirectX is not supported by Allplan. If you use the real time animation, then we recommend graphic cards which support the OpenGL hardware acceleration (see the graphics cards of the above list, which are marked with a star *).

In principle graphic cards can also be used which do not support the OpenGL hardware acceleration, since the current Windows versions contain the so-called Generic OpenGL.
Also graphics cards without special 3D acceleration hardware are supported by this Generic OpenGL.
The screen rendering is mostly however clearly slower than with appropriate hardware. In this case we recommend you do not operate the graphic card with the "True Color palette" and not with high resolutions.