My first Laptop (OpenGL Developer)

Hi Guys!!!
It’s such a long time I don’t write here!
I am right now in other projects but will get back soon to OpenGL! :slight_smile:

I have a desktop computer with a FX 5500 GeForce 256 MB video card, and I can’t even program with shaders that I am so long wanting to try! (Shaders run at 1fps or if lucky at 3fps :stuck_out_tongue: )

I am about to buy my first laptop, and I wanted to know if with a “NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 128MB” that comes bundled if it will be better or worse than my FX 5500 and if I am going to be able to use shaders (at normal fps) and if my programs will run faster or slower.

The fact that I am getting out of the 5000 series sounds promising, however the 128 MB I have no clue what difference it makes.

This is a very low price offer, so I am not considering buying a better one (either I buy… or wait till the notebooks I want get cheaper or buy a better desktop!)

Thanks so much!
Cheers!
Rod

The memory is not so useful to develop shaders. It is just you will be more limited in the number of textures or framebuffer objects. And 128 is already quite a lot.
Anyway for a coder, it is not a big limitation. For a gamer however…

The 6x series is much better than 5x, you can do usable GLSL, but obsoleted by both the 7x and 8x, so newest features such as geometry shaders will not be available. You will have more limitations, such as shader length etc.

The GeForce Go 6150 is very limited. The 128 MB are shared memory (Turbo cache). It won’t be faster than the FX5500.
I would recommend a GF8600m in a notebook and a GF8800 in a Desktop as minimum for OpenGL development.

Thanks guys!

The point about memory importance was very useful. :slight_smile:

Regarding oc2k1’s comment: yes… I was considering the fact that as the video card is integrated it will be slower… However, if I increase the computer RAM, will that improve also the Graphics performance?!

I am not considering buying a laptop with a 8000 series card as I want to buy the laptop as an intermediate solution before I renew my desktop around mid-year…
There are other laptops with Intel integrated graphics cards and more memory (256mb); however, from what I read and experienced Intel sucks at OpenGL and I won’t even be able to run more that OpenGL 1.1. Is this right?!

Thanks so much!
I am glad to hear back again from you!
I was missing this community (Zbuffer I always remember your posts from years before :))

Cheers!
Rod

In this case, as a temporary solution for programming GLSL, I would definitely go for the nvidia. The added memory on intel will not be really useful.

Thank for the compliment :slight_smile:
This time will you post some screenshots of your works ? :slight_smile:

Hi ZBuffer!
I am so glad that you remember me too :slight_smile:

ZBuffer:This time will you post some screenshots of your works ? :slight_smile:

Sure! Here are some screens of my progress… :slight_smile:
I hope you like them. I made many improvements on the terrain engine and I am very satisfied with results now.

As you may see from the difference of earlier screens, I created a non-flat terrain and I started adding some plants too, altough objects don’t cast shadows to the terrain yet. I guess that will change once I get GLSL up and running (and I get more time free with the current non-GL projects!) :slight_smile:

The plants positioning system worked out fine too. In previous versions I was placing plants one by one on a grid, and now I randomly populate the world by using parameters such as terrain slope and height (so I can indicate from what range of heights or slopes certain plants may or may not be placed), so I highly recommend this approach! (do you guys do the same?). This let’s the engine place plants that are tilted according to the terrain’s plane too, although sometimes the derivative approximation (or something that I have to fix in my code that I am not sure ) fails and you may get one of those glitches you may see in one of the palms’s pictures.

I hope you like them anyways, it’s been lots, lots, lots of hours and hard work :slight_smile:

I wish great holidays and happy new year to all :slight_smile:
Cheers!
Rod

P.S: By the way, do any of you guys know how/where to activate the send-email upon reply functionality in the forum (like before)? :stuck_out_tongue: