Hi John,
To answer one of your questions, there are many advantages to using the high performance driver when available:
- Optimized to ensure data is copied as minimally as possible with the lowest overhead. The pure performance gains are hard to quantify as they depend a lot on the conditions. In general, the more packets per second (data rate divided by packet size) and more cameras in use, the more the performance gains of the high-performance driver.
- Optimized for GigE Vision usage (amount of buffer allocations, jumbo frames, packet interrupt settings, etc). You can tweak a lot of those settings in Intel's drivers (much more than other vendors), but not all of them, and there is no extra configuration required when you use ours.
- Works regardless of firewall configuration
- Packet resend requests for corrupted/lost data are handled at a much lower level with much less latency and overhead
- Uses jumbo frames for GigE Vision only without affecting the rest of the network stack (enabling jumbo frames on a system-wide basis can lead to some annoying network issues)
- In Windows versions prior to Vista, multiple cameras connected to multiple network interfaces could not make proper use of automatic link-local-addressing. With our High-Performance driver you can bridge the multiple ports into a single virtual device that will let you multiply your overall bandwidth as easily as a single port.
Now, in terms of which interfaces are supported, we support most of the Pro/1000 series that are and were in widespread use. In general though, the only ones we can guarantee are the ones that are built into cards that NI sells since we can do our own validation on them. Because if this, our drivers INF files will limit themselves to specific chipsets that we have validated internally. So the best way to guarantee compatibility would be to get the cards from NI.
However, ff you have a copy of IMAQdx installed, you can look at the nigevk.inf file (typically in C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\NI-IMAQdx\Staging\NI GigE Vision) to see which PCI IDs are listed in the INF file. The PCI ids are the best I can advise because Intel's product labeling is not always clear as to which chipset and revision the card has on it.
The 82574L is listed in our currently shipping high performance driver's INF as PCI ID 0x10D3, so if you have that same one it *should* be supported. I'd advise against the GT line because 32bit/33Mhz PCI does not have the bandwidth to sustain GigE Vision traffic.
Hope this helps,
Eric
Message Edited by BlueCheese on 12-02-2009 02:35 PM
