A Discussion About Video Cards

Marine Engineering Specialists -- Bentley Systems has acquired Ultramarine's MOSES Software [ Press Release ]

To run MOSES in "gui" mode, a hardware OpenGL accelerated video card is highly recommended. MOSES renders models with actual cross-sections as specified by the model, and in detailed rendering mode, this can result in over 2,000,000 polygons (that's 2 million) being rendered on screen at the same time. For most models, a modest $40 video card, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 2 is sufficient. For models approaching or in excess of 5,000 elements, either a NVIDIA GeForce 4, GeForce FX, or ATI Radeon card is recommended. These cards are currently available for less than $100. For models with 30,000 or more elements, a GeForce FX or ATI Radeon 9800 or better will give much smoother rendering.

The NVidia TNT2 is not recommended as it tends to be unstable under the load MOSES puts on it. Most manufacturers fail to install a proper cooling system, and under load the card tends to overheat and lock the machine.

Finally, if the water or ground appear to be moving in directions that don't correspond to the translations or rotations being applied, it is due to a lack of precision in your 3D video card. Some of the low end cards tend to use lower precision in their texture calculations; you may be able to increase the precision in the driver settings, but that is dependent on the video card. If the texture motion is too distracting, you can remove the files images/ocean.tga and images/ground.tga and the program will render using solid colors.