Freeview depends upon graphics packages such as Qt and VTK. My understanding is those packages can make use of OpenGL if the version is recent enough. That being said, I thought I read VTK may drop OpenGL in version 8 or future versions (freeview currently uses vtk version 7). Looks like it is worthwhile to use a graphics card that supports OpenGl version 3 or higher (maybe the newest version is up to 4.X ?). The version numbers for OpenCL may be different and I don’t recall what those are up to now. But supporting the newer version of those should be preferable on linux machines.

For MacOS, graphics cards need to support Apple's Metal Framework (since Mojave, 10.14.X) and OpenGL has been deprecated. Apple stopped providing Nvidia with the information needed to create Mac graphics drivers and currently uses AMD cards.. Consequently only older/used Nvidia cards work with MacOS which I suspect support only old versions of OpenGL. So if you have a Mac that allows you to install a graphics card (or you build a Hackintosh), then Nvidia cards are not the most up to date choice and you could be better off with AMD hardware.

- R.

On Sep 23, 2021, at 02:45, Tim Schäfer <ts+ml@rcmd.org> wrote:

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FreeSurfer does not require any special graphics card, you can chose whatever card you like (as long as it works under Linux, but I haven't come across one that did not in the last 10 years or so).

*If* you want to run stuff on the GPU (the current FreeSurfer version does not support it afaik, but maybe you have other use cases), an Nvidia card may be better because from what I am seeing, CUDA seems to be more widely used than OpenCL. If you do not care about CUDA or have never used it, chances are high you can completely ignore this.

Tim

--
Dr. Tim Schäfer
Postdoc Computational Neuroimaging
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy
University Hospital Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany

On 09/23/2021 8:24 AM Falko Mecklenbrauck <f_meck01@uni-muenster.de> wrote:

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Hello Freesurfer Developers,

the old Linux-Computer Freesurfer was running on broke down and now we
need to buy a new one.
The recommondations in the systems requirements were very helpful, but
they seem a bit outdated.
For Graphics Card it says:

* /ATI (AMD) vs nVidia: We still spec nVidia because we don't have
   problems with its OpenGL-X driver under linux.. Perhaps ATI has
   finally supplied one that works, but this hasn't been attempted in a
   couple years. ATI cards on the Mac work fine with freesurfer though. ///
* /GPU: We no longer support [further] CUDA or GPU development because
   of lack of resources and difficulty, in preference to using OpenMP,
   which uses CPU cores. We will continue to support the existing GPU
   CUDA code that runs on recon-all with the -use-gpu switch. By
   support, keeping it running with each new nvidia cuda driver release
   as best as we can./

Is this still accurate? The Tech support at my university would order an
AMD graphics card, since the issue with the drivers for Linux seems to
be fixed. Does anyone has any current experiences with AMD vs. nVidia
graphics cards?

Thanks in advance and best wishes,
Falko

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