Hi!
Has anyone tryedAutodesk Showcase on a laptop with a Geforce GT 310m, 320m, 325m, 240m, or GeForce 9300M GS, 8200M graphics card? I have to buy a new laptop since Showcase DOES NOT work with Intel based ATI Mobility Radeon cards like HD 5650…
I think you will probably be in pain doing anything with any of those chipsets you named. Those are all mid to low end chips and they really do not have the firepower to handle showcase unless you are only doing fairly simple scenes.
If you can’t get a workstation laptop with a Quadro solution, consider at least bumping up to a laptop with one of the GTX 460M chipsets with at least 1 gig of video ram. Also, Geforce chipsets are not officially supported. I have seen some issues crop up on the Geforce cards although most of them can be worked around. I’ve used it on my Geforce 460 at home and it works fairly well despite a few limitations.
Ok thanks. I just found out that Showcase did work with my ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650. But i guess I can get much more out of Showcase with a high end card… Are the older quadro cards like FX1600 512MB even better than the mid to low end cards that i listed?
Showcase will run on just about anything, but you may find as you start getting deeper that things that should work don’t. I’ve noticed issues with lighting objects (too many lights assigned to an object will cause it to just turn bright white), issues with transparency, etc.
Something like the FX1600 (older mid range) would definitely be a better choice then the other ones listed.
Thanks for the info. I´m a student and my budget is a bit limited, but i guess i´ll get more out of showcase with a 2008 workstation laptop like Dell M6300 ( Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 3GB RAM and a FX1600 512MB card)
compared to a 2010 standard laptop with say i5 2,66 GHz 4GB RAM and a 2010 low/mid range graphics card with 1024 MB dedicated graphics memory.
It depends what you’re doing I suppose. If you’re a student and only throwing a limited amount of data at it you might be able to get by with a new laptop with a mid level gaming card. Your performance will be limited but Showcase has a lot of functions for improving performance and then changing to improve quality when you need.
If you were going to go the new route, I would just say to find one that has as high end of a video card as you can. Since Showcase also has raytracing mode, the i5 will be a lot faster in that regard.