3D on macbook pro / iMac

[ABK]

I realise I'm probably opening a can of worms here...

 

What do people think of the 3D capabilities of the macbook pro with it's standard graphics card?

Also, how about imacs?

 

I'm interested in what the graphics card can do and how much infomation it can handle live in the viewport - I realise they can have as good a processing power and RAM as any machine.

 

I've heard varied reports but had limited experience.

 

Opinions please!

 

 

Cheers,

Antony

[Corey Beaulieu]

I run Windows 7 through boot camp on my MBP and in its own screen space I get great results. No issues really to speak of and decent speed with Max 2012. Where it all breaks down is in the fact that I extend my monitor to a larger screen. In this scenario the graphics card (nvidia) starts to lose geometry in the viewport and struggle more to generally do things. It's not terrible by any means, but it's a noticable drop in performance.

 

In th past I've run BIM software on an 2007 iMac and had a lot of trouble with scenes that had a lot of geometry, the screen would fall into a "bezier" looking state and I would need to delete something to get it back. That machine was old though and I wouldn't expect this from anything current.

 

Overall I'm pretty happy with my setup, but I think this is because it is a personal setup. If I were doing commercial work on it, I don't know that I would choose the MBP over a desktop PC.

Edited January 31, 2012 by CoreyMBeaulieu

[AJLynn]

The 13" model has Intel chipset graphics - not good enough. The 15" and 17" have Radeon 6750 and 6770, which are much better. Note that to get any real performance you need to run Windows in Bootcamp, not Parallels or VMWare, so that Windows accesses the hardware directly instead of going through an emulation layer and the memory isn't shared. This means that going between Windows and Mac requires a reboot.