[ros-users] RViz/OGRE3D and PCL hardware requirements/recomm…

Hi guys,

I'm having a problem running Rviz on my computer, which is an Intel Core
i5 2.4Ghz with an on-die GPU (integrated, but decent spec considering
it's made by Intel). According to google results this is at least
comparable to older nVidia graphics cards, but I can barely run Rviz and
it's very laggy on Ubuntu 10.10 with everything up to date. I also am
trying to work with the Kinect and openNI but the visualizations that
use Rviz are just too slow, although the regular libfreenect examples
(eg. freenect-glpclview) work perfectly fine at full framerate. It seems
like OGRE3D doesn't like intel GPUs unfortunately, but I've noticed that
some people are doing things with Atom boards, so I'm wondering whether
anyone else is able to run Rviz on Intel GPUs.

I'm considering getting a cheap Intel Atom dual-core + nVidia ION box
for developing if it's unlikely for Rviz to work at all on Intel GPUs.
Would this be good enough for basic development? Ideally I could try to
run any CPU intensive nodes on my Core i5 and just do the visualization
on the ION box. Does anyone have experience with Atom+ION computers and
Rviz? I really need a development computer so that I don't need to go
into the lab to do anything useful. Thanks!

(Addendum: Rviz also doesn't like new Radeon graphics cards either,
which is unfortunate because I do have a desktop with a high end Radeon
card. So in general, am I stuck with nVidia for doing anything with
Rviz, or is anyone having success with non-nVidia cards?)

--
-Ibrahim Awwal