GRcade

Hello guys. I'm looking to buy a laptop so that I can use Autodesk Maya 2010/ 3d studio max 2010 and suchlike programmes. It would be nice if it were able to play high-spec pc games too but this is not a necessity.

Anyhow what I'm really liking the look of is the Alienware M17x, however I notice on Autodesk's website it says that recommended graphics cards for Maya 2010 are either Nvidia Quadro variants or ATI FireGL variants.

Does anybody here have any experience with Maya, that can recommend any systems, graphics cards or just general things to look for in a laptop 'workstation'...?

Thanks!

I use maya in my animation degree and have a copy of 2008 on my laptop. I have a standard sony vaio laptop has like 2GB memory pretty standard graphics card etc and it works fine. I mean there is slight lag but I think you will get that on a laptop anyway for maya to run smoothly you need a powerful PC to be honest but it does the job.
it only lags when I play back but its fine if I do it for playblast so its no trouble really.

as for if you want to do high spec gaming that's where i think you will need to either upgrade or buy a super spec laptop

Wykesie wrote:I use maya in my animation degree and have a copy of 2008 on my laptop. I have a standard sony vaio laptop has like 2GB memory pretty standard graphics card etc and it works fine. I mean there is slight lag but I think you will get that on a laptop anyway for maya to run smoothly you need a powerful PC to be honest but it does the job.
it only lags when I play back but its fine if I do it for playblast so its no trouble really.

as for if you want to do high spec gaming that's where i think you will need to either upgrade or buy a super spec laptop

WTF no I remember we tried Maya and it ran perfectly with no lag?!

Lol no you lie it does on playing back animations

Maya doesn't run well on any machine.

What you need is lots of cores and lots of RAM.

FireGL and Quattro vastly accelerate OpenGL rendering compared to normal graphics cards which speeds up real time rendering. I think Dell do a couple of machines that include them.