Optimizing computer for Maya
 

Hello all,

I have a Toshiba Satellite Laptop with the following specs:

32 MB GeForce 460 Go video card
512 MB Ram
Intel Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz CPU

I often have problems with lag in Maya. Can someone tell me what to do to optimize the computer or things I can do in Maya to reduce lag?

Thanks in advance,

Drought

a new video card wouldnt hurt, although i dont know much about laptop video cards... everything else is perfectly suitable for maya. Some people prefer to have atleast a gig of ram also (such as me) but 512 is supposed to be the minimum and when i had 512 in my old machine running this software it seemed to work for me. your processor is pretty nice, i wont even have to comment on that... all in all to make story short.. get a better video card, everything will run better....with the specs you have now.. that card has to be bottle necking your system

i have a 64 meg geforce card and 320 megs of ram. and a 1.3 ghz
processor and maya runs well for me.

where do you see the lag ? when doing what ?

512mb is "minimum" your ok as long as you don't have to much loaded at a time.

Thanks for the replies guys. I wasn't even aware that I could change the video card on the laptop. I thought I was pretty much stuck with what I have.

Pony, I am currently doing Kurt's dog modeling tutorial. Things start out fine, but I get the lag after I put the reference plane up and begin adding the geometry. When you say, "too much loaded at a time", I am assuming there is something that can be done at this point to relieve the strain on the system? I deleted the history, but is there perhaps something else I could do?

Drought

well if your video card is integrated i dont know if you can upgrade.. like i said i dont know much about how things are set up internally on a lap top as i've never owned one.. but on a desktop if you have an inegrated graphics card you either have to buy a new motherboard (which if you have an HP you cant do becuase for some reason they dont use ATX cases) or go with a PCI graphics card.. which is the cheapest alternative

well if it slows down when you pan around the sceen thin its lickly the video car. If its slow when you pull verts around thin its probably a ram prob.. expecaly if it only happence once you get a lot of polys in there..

if your not always useing the image plan's for ref.. you can speed things up buy terning them off. make a hot key for it if you want. Need help with that just let me know.

Ok, thanks for the advice guys.