Friday, April 27, 2012

Which notebook VGA cards are recommended?

Can anyone list NVIDIA or ATI video cards supporting OpenGL 2.0 or better? I'm browsing the web for notebooks / laptops with the following specs:

* Windows 7 / Vista / XP (Vista 64 is the best choice, followed by Vista 32 and then XP)

* Multi-Core CPU (Celerons are not recommended)

* 4 GB of Memory

* 8 GB of available hard disk space

* A newer NVIDIA or ATI video card supporting OpenGL 2.0 or better with at least 512MB of video memory; more is better.



It is suppose to run Chief Architect software.

I come across a lot of laptops but can't decide if the laptop's VGA card does indeed supports OpenGL 2.0.|||A laptop with an actual video card in it isn't going to be cheap. Most are targeted at gamers.

That being said, a few that I can think of of the top of my head would be:



NVidia:

GeForce 8600/8700/8800M

GeForce 9500/9600/9800M

GeForce 2xxM series

GeForce 3xxM series (not in production yet)



ATI:

Radeon 3000/4000 Mobile series



Not all 8600/8700M and 9500M cards were 512mb. Some are 256mb.

All laptop video cards made by NVidia after that point are at least 512mb, with some 1gb models on the market.



I'm less familiar with mobile Radeon cards, but the same holds true. The lower-end/older cards tend to have less memory.



One final note, all of the above cards support at least OpenGL 2.0. The newer ones are OpenGL 3.2 native, so you are good to go on that front.

No comments:

Post a Comment