Computer System and Setup Recommendations? (case 2912)

[lpadams]

I'm in the process of setting up a laboratory and I am trying to decide which type of laptop to purchase. I know that the graphics card is perhaps the most important consideration when selecting computers to run DirectRT (as you've stated above, 128 MB's Minimum; 256 MB's Recommended). Do these recommendations refer to a dedicated or shared/dynamic graphics cards?

Would a laptop using a shared/dynamic graphics card be capable of running Direct RT?

[Trevor Newell]

The recommendations refer to dedicated memory; however shared/dynamic memory can tend to work just as well. Dedicated memory will always be faster as the card itself can manage all the memory that is used when running an application like DirectRT. Shared/dynamic memory will be slightly slower and may impact performance.

Also - I've lowered the minimum specs. down to 32 MB's of memory. 128 MB's would be -far- more than needed (not that there's anything wrong with that).

To answer your question -
Yes; a laptop using shared/dynamic memory would be capable of running Direct RT.

[hwhitty]

Hi,

I noticed the above recommendations were for running DirectRT--what are the minimum recommended specifications if I were to use MediaLab? I need to buy a another laptop for my study and I don't have a lot of money to spend on a laptop, so I want to make sure I have "just" what I need to run MediaLab smoothly.

Thanks.

[jarvis]

The basic requirements are about the same for MediaLab. Almost any machine you can purchase now is going to have sufficient resources to run most MediaLab and DirectRT experiments. With DirectRT, our only strong recommendation is to get a nice dedicated graphics system (with its own dedicated memory) that is not simply a chip on the mother board. Also, when Windows Vista and Windows 7 came around we seemed to get reports of problems with a number of Dell Optiplex systems, and also with some machines using Radeon graphics cards. When people are having display trouble and I ask people about their hardware, in many cases, I hear "Dell Optiplex, Radeon HD graphics card". But then again, Version 2012 seems to be working nicely with even these systems now. We are always working on hardware compatibility--let us know if you run into any issues.