Need advice for verry powerful laptop to un ubuntu on

Hallo, I'm working on a project using openscenegraph and I ran into a performance issue.
We started using more complex models with animation and particle effects and they're slowing down to seconds per frame range.
At first I thought it was just the use of more complex objects on an intell vidcard (I'm using an asus ul30vt notebook), so I enabled the nvidia discrete graphics (g210m 512mb) and nothing seems to have changed ...

I'm now looking for a portable workstation /gamer's rig that will play well with ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

I'm considering the lenovo W510, Dell precision m4500 and Toshiba Tecra M10, but I've never used a professional graphics card (quadro or firegl) and don't know what they do differently from their gamer counterparts.

I was hoping that some of the more knowledgeable people here could clarify my doubts and possibly point me in the direction of a powerful but trustworthy linux laptop.

TIA,

Matt

Usually Quadro cards use slightly lower clockspeeds than the Geforce counter parts, but for laptops that was always a vendors choice which speed was really used. Compare the chips used

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro

As the nameing scheme for Quadro is not that easy to understand. Geforce is much simpler. Is is however pretty hard to get fermi based chips in a laptop (some rare laptops use even desktop chips).

Thanks, I was wondering what the differences would be ...

Any advice about Powerful laptops that aren't a PITA to get ubuntu LTS running on? I've been looking at the Lenovo W510, Toshiba Tecra s11 and Dell vostro 3300/3500/3700 with the discrete nvidia graphics for the moment.

I've had Debian going on a few Sager notebooks:

http://sagernotebook.com/index.php?p...ed_cat=special

My experience is that the W510 works very well with debian sid (with nvidia binary driver).

'seconds per frame' you say? How much of an increase are you expecting? You realize that if its taking multiple seconds per frame, the fastest laptop out there is EXTREMELY unlikely to take you out of this general range. Maybe not AS MANY seconds per frame, but it'll still be terrible.

Have you considered that for this kind of work, you might be better off running these processes on some kind of very strong SERVER?

Also, if switching from intel to nvidia GPU didn't change much, then the process is probably bound to the CPU and not the GPU, in which case a lotsa-cores opteron server might be able to get you out of that seconds-per-frame problem much better than any kind of laptop.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by randomas

Hallo, I'm working on a project using openscenegraph and I ran into a performance issue.
We started using more complex models with animation and particle effects and they're slowing down to seconds per frame range.
At first I thought it was just the use of more complex objects on an intell vidcard (I'm using an asus ul30vt notebook), so I enabled the nvidia discrete graphics (g210m 512mb) and nothing seems to have changed ...

I'm now looking for a portable workstation /gamer's rig that will play well with ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

I'm considering the lenovo W510, Dell precision m4500 and Toshiba Tecra M10, but I've never used a professional graphics card (quadro or firegl) and don't know what they do differently from their gamer counterparts.

I was hoping that some of the more knowledgeable people here could clarify my doubts and possibly point me in the direction of a powerful but trustworthy linux laptop.

TIA,

Matt

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Thanks for all the advice!

We did some more testing and it turned out that the bottleneck was of our own making, and that it was all CPU dependant ... :-p

Not scene graph or gpu bound after all. Having discovered that we were pushing our software beyond its capacity we toned a few things down a notch and it turns out the rendering works fine on any modern intell integrated chipset ... (Nvidia actually has a few rendering problems I need to test more appropriately to put a bug report through).

So I guess there goes my excuse to acquire a W510 ... ;-)


Thanks again,

Matt