Celestia Forums

I'm thinking of getting a new laptop. It's for work, but it would be fun if it improved my Celestia experience too. I believe nVidia cards are best for Celestia, right? The laptop I'm interested in comes with an nVidia GeForce Go 6150 video card. But I read somewhere that this is an 'integrated' graphics driver, which is not as good as a 'proper' graphics card. Is that right?

As you can probably tell, I'm not very knowledgeable, so if anyone thinks I'm likely to be wasting my money, let me know!

I belive you are right about the GeForce G0 6150. Its intergrated into the Northbridge chipset. This means of course it uses the notebooks main RAM for its own Graphics RAM. Not the best by a long shot. You need to look for a notebook computer that has a seperate graphics chip or grahics board that has dedicated VRAM of its own. They do cost more of course. But if money is going to be an issue with this notebook, the 6150 should still be quiet usable, all be it a bit slower. The main thing is that if you go with this notebook, get as much system RAM as you can for it. Most notebook bios' have the ability to adjust the amount of RAM you wish the card to use for frambuffering. Some of these intergrated chips can use up to 256MB of system RAM just graphics use alone if its set for that purpose. So I would make sure you get at least 1GB of system RAM with this notebook. If you can can swing more than that go for it. Or you can just look around for another notebook. No I am no lover DELL, but many of the DELL notebooks use seperate garphics cards in them that can be removed and upgrated later. So if you perchase an Inspiron with a say a 5xxx series card you later upgrade that to a 6xxx or 7xxx or even an 8xxx series card when they come out card very easily. Nvidia created a whole new graphics card spec for notebooks, the MXM card for doing this. I am not sure if DELL uses the MXM card or builds there own. But these cards plug into the notebook like a super sized SO DIMM memory module. But don't quote me on that, I have yet to work on one these newer machines and get inside to see what makes it tick.

So you at this point you have to make the choice over what you want and can pay for. The notebook with the 6150 solution will work as I a said, but it will be a bit slow. Another thing to investigate is wether this notebook is alowing the graphics chip to only use system RAM or if it has a dicreate frambuffer of its own. The technology Nvidia used on these 61xx chips alowed them to have have 64MB of their own frambuffer memory and also use system RAM when needed for extending it frame buffer. Its hard to say what version of the chip is being used without looking over the specs this machine in more detail.

I hope this has helped more than confused.

Don. Edwards

Thank you so much for this advice! Looks like this system does have 1GB of RAM, so maybe I'll give it a try and see what happens.

Thanks again!

If anyone's interested, I bought the machine I mentioned, and it's pretty good. The performance is very fast even with 32k virtual textures + a 32k spec map. If you add any more VTs it grinds to a halt and 64k VTs seem to be beyond it. Not bad for $800 though.

Every *new* computer I've ever bought has always lacked current drivers (video drivers especially)... so my advise is that you immediately check the manufacturer's website for the most current drivers applicapable to your computer's graphics processor. Nvidia's website direct will be your best and most reliable source for this.

Blimey, you're right! That did improve things a bit. Cheers!