Bit off topic perhaps but does anyone do their game/graphics dev on a laptop? I have a great desktop setup with a 240GTX but it's not setup all the time and I'd like to just pick up a laptop and do some dev when I feel like it.
Can anyone recommend if there's anything comparable to the 240GTX yet? Or if not, what's the best setup to go for which would give me relatively comparable graphics performance to the xbox 360. Budget not really a problem.
Thanks (I'm in the UK)
Laptop for graphics development
I can't give you any advice on which laptop to buy, but from my experience I'd say that you should NOT buy a laptop with switchable graphics (one high performance and one low performance for battery usage) as this is causing me major problems for driver updates: because lenovo doesn't feel like updating their drivers a lot I had to use some unoffical hacky drivers and even these are the 11.3 drivers while the new ones are 11.10. Before I used the hacky drivers I couldn't even use openCL because it requires newer drivers.
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Thanks. I've been looking at one with an Nvidia GTX560m which looks pretty good - anyone have one of these cards in their laptop?
Check this out. I develop and game on my laptop, I have a Geforce GTS 360M and I haven't had any problems running BF3 or any other games. The GTX 560M seems to be way better than the GTS 360M so you shouldn't have any problems running any game graphics card wise.
I've been using K52JE with Radeon 5470 - quite good for graphics development (of course as I'm doing some performance heavy stuff (like GI, realtime ray tracing, etc.), I have to test it also on real machines sometimes (having few desktops at home/work) - but using such notebook really made me optimize my code a lot further than it was) ... so next time I'm also going to buy this-like cheaper notebook.
The biggest problem I found in development on laptops is that I can't run my projects on nVidia Parallel nSight so I'm not able to profile them on the laptop. Is anyone able to use Parallel nSight on laptops?
I actually do lots of my development work on a laptop, but I have found that the lack of driver support is the biggest problem... If you can find a solution that has drivers from the manufacturer, then you will be much better off.
I actually do lots of my development work on a laptop, but I have found that the lack of driver support is the biggest problem... If you can find a solution that has drivers from the manufacturer, then you will be much better off.
How do you profile your projects on the laptop? PIX only?
Performance testing is limited to my desktop, since since I don't have a D3D11 card in my laptop. Even so, since DX9 it has always been a problem to get decent driver updates on a laptop GPU. I really don't have any clue why the driver experience is so totally different between desktop parts and laptops, since they use the same processors...
Anyhow, any algorithms that will run on D3D10 hardware can be tested in realtime, but for performance you should always go for the desktop.
Anyhow, any algorithms that will run on D3D10 hardware can be tested in realtime, but for performance you should always go for the desktop.
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I went for a Novatech laptop in the end, gtx560m with 1.5gb RAM, i7 2.4ghz, 8gb ram, 320gb 7200rpm hd, apparently this setup will play most games at native resolution at a good fps speed so that's good enough for me. I know it'll probably never happen but any 3d dev I do I envisage it ending up on xbox360 so it'll be fine I think.
I'll post results when I get it
I'll post results when I get it
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