IBM R50p laptop with ATI Mobility Fire Gl T2 video - why so slow?

For the last 3 years, laptops working well with SolidWorks all appear to have one thing in common, from what I read here on the Swks group (& 2 Dells I bought): the highest end nVIDIA G.... laptop video card with complete Open GL compatibility.

Look @ the Dell Precision M60 specs for the graphics card, and see if IBM will ship a ThinkPad with one.

I have an M60, a friend has the M50, and I have an older Inspiron 8000 and the nVIDIA cards are really good with Solidoworks. The I8000 with only 32 megs of VRAM is now 'dottering', but useful. The M60 is very fast on big assembly rotations for my work.

I am amazed that many laptop manufacturers do not allow any video card changeout options. Seems like money in their pockets to me if they offered various levels of laptop video cards.

Bo

It's been five years since I worked on laptops, but in those days the graphics "card" was a single chip integrated on the mother board or sometimes a couple of chips on a daughter board. The daughter board was a proprietary design with a proprietary interface, not the PCI bus (AGP wasn't around yet) . Offering multiple choices would have been very difficult. No doubt things have changed quite a bit since then, but it is still probably difficult to offer multiple choices of graphics hardware.

Jerry Steiger

As you suggested, I think most high-end laptops now have mini PCI slots, where nVIDIA or ATI's cards go. I thought I remembered some mfgrs like Sager offered a choice now.

Still, it appears that the nVIDIA card in Laptops is the best way to get good Solidworks performance at the moment.

Bo

An interesting development in the laptop market is a company that has a upgradeable graphics card bay. All you have to do is buy an upgrade card and swap out like you do on a regular desktop (note: the cards are special laptop version they offer not desktop cards)

The link will take you to the site showing and explaining what i was talking about. I hope this becomes a trend in laptops.

Hello Jim,

could you meanwhile fix the graphics performance with a driver update? I'm looking at buying the 1,7GHz / 2 GB RAM machine to run mainly SolidWorks on it. The FireGL T2 gets decent reviews otherwise, geared specifically at Open/GL so I'm a bit puzzled with your comment.

Regards,

Thilo

1.7GHz Pentium M, performs with solidWorks REALLY NICE!! I have HP nw8000 Laptop, wich uses the Ati mobility FireGL T2 (128MB own memory).... and it beats the living shit out of the "standard" desktop machines used here to run SW (Siemens Pentium 4-HT with Quadros etc.)

I'm still waiting the HP to update their drivers so I could get the RealView on 2004 to work....

Can't you use these?

If you can I'd be very curious to hear how smooth swx runs with it.

Posted earlier about those....

damn drivers identify my GPU as 9600.... I get RealView button active with those drivers, but nothing happens with it...