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

[Ibrahim Awwal]

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