Graphics-intensive work:

Does anybody do Open GL- or DX9-intensive dynamic drawings on their late model Core machines? 3D Studio? Maya? Gaming or Lightwave?

Or heavy-duty Photoshop? Moving large bitmaps into place?

Have you found that your system memory is a major factor in how fast the framerate or redraw is onscreen? Is 3 GB better than 1 GB? Is 4 even better?

Thanks.

 

Sure memory is important as you mentioned. But keep in mind that with the 32bit OS, which is XP, you can have a 2GB max. Photoshop speed is also related to your HDD speed, 4200rpm just doesnt cut it in Photoshop.

And open GL performance is also related to your video card.

I'm not sure where you're getting at with your question, but I doubt that you will be needing more than 2GB of memory, or are you planning on doing intensive renderings on your laptop?

 

don't use ait firegl cards for ur lightwave, in general, don't use Open GL on ATI cards.
my friend uses T43p to do lightwave and he told me that there is a bug in ATI's driver. the error is NTDLL.dll error and it is yet to be solved. he asked ATI, lenovo, ligthwave and even CGTalk forum, but on one knows.

regarding to ATI's firegl driver. there are two kinds of ATI's drivers. they are either Firegl or mobility firegl. however, no matter what version of driver you have, they don't not support mobility firegl's pci id. (try read the inf file if you have doubt). mobility firegl's id can only be found in Catalyst. the differnce between normal ati card and firegl is they uses different opengl file. for giregl, it is ATIOGLGL.DLL, for normal card, it is ATIOGLXX.DLL. (NV only have one opengl file for all of those card, which is nvoglnt.dll. therefore, by switching those two files, you can gain improvements while playing 3d game (but it will be slower when running Maya, 3d MAX, lightwave).

however, if you doing DX9 stuff, firegl is decent, also, firegl supports UG very well.



well. what do i know.

 

I use 3D Studio, and propose flipping the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE 3GB switch in the boot.ini on XP Pro in order to allow the application to take advantage of 3 GBs of process space.

If it will use that space. I don't know whether I should purchase > 2 GB for my notebook if nothing's gonna come close to using that. Heck, I don't even know if 3D Studio is set up for that, earlier versions or late. I know AutoCAD 2007 is.

The T60 will be the most powerful machine I own. I'll have to defer upgrading the desktop 'till another day. I'm convinced that 3DS will run faster on the notebook than anything I've got it on currently. I just would like to know that if I give it in excess of 2 GB, that it will be inclined to use it. I'll be using a 5400 SATA, but the hope is that if I provide the RAM, that the OS/app combo won't feel a need to revert to it.

The bigger hope is that the app will use > 2 GB at all. Is it inclined to do so with files that hover around 10 MB (3 or 4), i.e., a 10 MB .MAX file + 10 MB .BMP + PCTV (maybe) + a couple of Firefoxes + Outlook + whatever?

All I know is that it feels like system memory is inclined to improve graphics performance in all the observation, reading and using I've done over the years. I just want some independent confirmation. But I've never personally used more than 1 GB--and there's too much else going on in that volume realm to form a hypothesis about what is used and what isn't at only 1 GB.

The graphics card is the wild card. I recently replaced a desktop 32 MB RADEON with a 256 MB RADEON 9550--and nothing changed. Surprising. I tried every permutation I could think of with the firmware and DX9 and Open GL and Heidi drivers and...no speed gain over the 32 MB. (?!)

Oddly, what I did notice however was that putting another 512 MB stick into the desktop to bring the system up to 1 GB speeded up probably by a factor of 2 even the cold boot black BIOS count up. That's weird.

If I do go with > 2 GB, I'd probably want share the results in a review.

 

The Mobile RADEON X1400 is all I can afford. That's probably not a Fire.

 

I'm a professional 3ds max user and use a T42p with currently 1.5GB.

I usually also have other programs running, like Photoshop (multiple textures up to 2048 resoultion), Zbrush and the usual suspects of Internet apps. Actually Zbrush was the main reason I upgraded from 1GB to 1.5, because the memory amount has a direct impact on the polycount Zbrush can handle smoothly.

Up to now I haven't felt the need for more RAM. I have to admit that my scenes are not very complex, as I do mostly character modeling related stuff, so no huge scenes. Still, Photoshop is a RAM eater and Zbrush also uses a lot in order to handle millions of polygons.

It really depends on your scene complexity, but I doubt you'd ever need more than 2GB - if the notebook is going to support it at all. Max has a bad reputation when it comes to handling huge data volumes, so you shouldn't juggle around with files which might justify the need of > 2GB anyway. Work smarter, not harder

Just my personal point of view without any real technical knowledge of the inner working of 3ds max.

Softimage claims that the new XSI is optimized to work with billions of polygons, though. Maybe you want to check that out, they might say something about the memory limits of competing products while bragging with their "gigapolygon core".

Have fun.

 

Thanks katamari.