[SOLVED] Can i run Maya or similar products?

[Natman03]

ATI mobility radeon HD 3400 series is my graphics card, and Dell studio 15 is my laptop, running on Windows Vista, i think thats prob all you need to know, will i be able to run programmes such as Maya or similar on this laptop?

Thanks Alot :D

[koala]

Hi, welcome to TSF

3D programs need lots of RAM and a good CPU. Onboard graphics like the HD3400 are generally not as good as proper graphics cards for games, but you should be ok for Maya. Try the free trial before buying.

[Inactive]

the more RAM the better. i'm running win2k with 1GB RAM on pc's for rendering only. my work station has 2GB, but since you are using vista a little more would not do any harm. i'm not a big fan of duel core cpu's, but with dcc applications like maya, both cores will be used while rendering.

i'd figure the graphics will be ok. it really depends on how large the scenes you will attempt to build. i build small scenes with some animation and i get by with an X800GT. i used to buy (middle range) workstation cards, but the price doesn't vindicate them.

a tip i would suggest is to reduce all of the unnecessary windows graphics. these might be nice for people who do little with the pc, but when you are trying to maximise the use of individual components on the pc, the last thing they need is updating animated cursors, keeping track of large background images and all of the fade and scroll effects that windows attempts. i'm not sure how you quickly disable all of these on vista, but in XP it was in the system properties>advanced tab> and select the settings button under performance. there you can select 'adjust for best performance' and a lot of these effects stop.

[Natman03]

i got 4 gig of ram on this laptop, and i wont need to worry about rendering too much, we have a render farm at my university