Industrial or military graphics cards

[Aleksandar]

Does anyone know a modern graphics card (OpenGL 2.0+/PCI-E x16, which excludes Intel) that is compliant to MIL-STD 810 standard, or at least an industrial version?

[ZbuffeR]

http://www.pureoverclock.com/story5046.html
This one is said to contain "military class" components, not sure if this is completely compliant or only some parts ...

[Aleksandar]

Thank you, ZbuffeR!

I found several cards claimed to have a military class components, but that doesn't mean anything.

For such specialized hardware manufacturers aways exposes standards they are compliant with. N460GTX Hawk is simply too cheap to have such characteristics. Industrial hardware should be functional in temperature range 0-60C (and storage range is even broader), and military hardware should reliably function from -40C. Aside from that, N460GTX Hawk seems to have too massive cooler to be resistive to vibrations.

[Nickolay Kolchin]

1. You need "OpenGL SC", not OpenGL. I highly doubt, that it is possible to pass Military/DO certification with "normal" OpenGL.
2. There are some products based on Imagination chips, that have full military certifications.
3. I've heard about NVidia based solutions, but all of them were project internal.
4. ALTsoftware specializes on certified driver development. They have "graphic processors" list: http://www.altsoftware.com/product/s...ics-processors

[Aleksandar]

Thank you Nickolay for several very concrete and very useful advices!

The problem with OpenGL SC is lack of functionality. It is more restrictive than OpenGL ES 1.0 Common Profile (+display lists). Returning to OpenGL 1.3 with more restrictive texturing (no compressed textures, no multisampling, no copying) is frustrating.

Imagination products seem to be too exotic. I need more time to realize how they can be incorporated into our solutions.

I guess NVIDIA have some "interesting" solutions, but I've never heard about them.

The best solution I have found on the net today is ATI Radeon E4690 Mobile PCI Express module (MXM). 512MB of on-board GDDR3 memory, 320 shader processors and OpenGL 3+ support is really respectable, as well as reduced power consumption and improved cooling capability.

[Nickolay Kolchin]

You are lucky, if you only need certified hardware, without certified software stack.

[Aleksandar]

Since now, we've been lucky, because nobody asked for certified software stack. If it would be changed, we are in a deep trouble.

Thank you for drawing my attention to those aspects of software development!