momodot opened this issue on Jan 26, 2006 ยท 21 posts
svdl posted Sat, 28 January 2006 at 6:11 AM
OpenGL has been around for quite some time, that's correct. Like DirectX, it exists in several versions: 1.0, 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0. OpenGL 2.0 is fairly recent, it's been incorporated in midrange and high end graphics cards since about 2 years ago. Poser wants OpenGL 1.5, AFAIK. The problem with many cheap graphics cards is that they only support OpenGL 1.0 or 1.1. Not all of them, though. nVidia is usually better at OpenGL support than ATI, probably because nVidia is more active in the professional 3D world (the Quadro series is well known) and their OpenGL knowledge "trickles down" to their consumer graphics cards. While ATI also has professional 3D graphics cards (the FireGL series), their market share in the professional 3D world is much less. If you can get an ATI FireGL based graphics chip in a laptop - go for it. Professional OpenGL support, verified against professional 3D apps like 3DS Max and Maya. It works fine and fast, guaranteed. As for the CPU, a Celeron just doesn't cut it. You're better off with an AMD Turion or Sempron. Think 64bit, you might want to be able to upgrade to a 64bit OS when Poser and other apps (finally!) migrate to 64bit.
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter