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Hi List,
           I owuld like to disagree with Craig. There are now quite a few programs that use the graphics card to process 3D data in real time now. MetaMorph, Imaris, Volocity, 3D Studio, Olympus FV1000, Leica LAS AF just to name a few.
 
There is an enourmous ammount of choice out there in the graphics card market, but my recomendation (and the recomendation of many other people) is to buy the best GAMING card you can afford. While each graphics card manuafacturer has "Workstation" class cards that cost a heap of money, these cards oare not really any better than a good gaming card. So avoid things like the Nvidia Quadro, ATI FirePro or Wildcat Studio type of cards.
 
So you are going to need something like an Nvidia Geforce 280GTX or an ATI Radeon HD 4870. You will need at least 512MB of RAM on the card as well. Also these cards cost in the order of $500-600 US dollars.
 
Now slapping a highend card in a lower end computer is not going to fix things either. To match the card you will need to have a good CPU (dual coe is fine, there are very, very few programs coded for more than 2 cores currently) and the more system RAM the better. If you are playing with large data sets (eg 2000 images per 3D stack) you will need to go beyond the maximum 4GB of RAM in a 32 bit system and go for a 64Bit system and put 16 or 32 GB RAM into it.
 
Fast hardrives will always help a little bit but not too much.
 
Also don't worry about going for a two graphics cards running togther (Nvidia SLI or ATI CrossFire), as far as i know there are no modeling programs out there yet that can leaverage both cards.
 
Hope that helps you out, if you need any more help just let me know.
 
 
 
Cheers
 
 
Cam
 
 
 
Cameron Nowell
Research and Microscopy Imaging Core
Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
Melbourne, Australia

________________________________

From: Confocal Microscopy List on behalf of Craig Brideau
Sent: Thu 14/08/2008 6:16 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: graphic cards


Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal 
Actually most image display and manipulation software uses your CPU rather than your GPU.  The CPU does all the number crunching then hands the resulting data off to the GPU (video card) to display it.  There are a handful of programs that will actually use the GPU instead, but they are few and far between as they require special programming.
What sort of processor, video card, and how much RAM do you have in your computer?

Craig



On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Marc Thibault <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal 

	Hi all,

	I would like to know what are the best graphic cards to add in your PC for microscopic 3D image analysis and manipulation.

	Mine is currently not up to the task.

	Thanks

	Marc



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