Questions about Laptops to run MAYA 8.5-2008

[Anonymous]

Hello to all...
I am a Graduate Student in Architecture. I use Maya to do 3D modelling, rendering, and small animations (fly throughs). At the moment I use Maya 7 on my 2.5 year old HP laptop. It does not have any major problems. Now I am searching for a new laptop and was wondering if any of you have any helpful advice regarding the following:
When looking at the autodesk website regading hardware specs this is what I found about NVIDIA video cards,

"There are many cards based on GeForce GPU chipsets. Nvidia and Autodesk do not recommend these cards for use with Maya as you may experience various refresh, display and stability problems and inadequate performance. We suggest you choose from Nvidia's workstation cards instead, such as the Quadro families which are much better suited to high-end 3D packages such as Maya. For more information, see Nvidia Nvidia GeForce VS Quadro White Paper "

The problem with this is that most of the 17" laptops available now have NVIDIA GeForce Cards in them including Apple MacBook Pro, HP, DELL XPS, TOSHIBA, etc.

My question is can these laptops run Maya successfully while using the GeForce cards?

I really would like to get a MacBookPro because am tired of Windows however I am hesitant to make the switch if I will not be able to run Maya. I know its possible to run using the windows side with Parallels or Virtual PC but my main concern is the video card. Has anyone run Maya 8.5 or 2008 on a MacBook Pro with leopard?

Does anyone have any info or advice regarding any of these issues? Much appreciated...thank you

[Anonymous]

Lot`s of my friends are running Maya on their mac book pros. Some under mac and some under bootcamp. And the performance is really good (compared to other laptops) .
Parallels is not an option! There are some really weird problems with graphics , rendering and .... .

I`ve been using a Mac version of maya 2008 for my personal uses and a PC version at work. Both versions are buggy but the Mac one seems to be smoother and more reliable.
I installed Leopard an hour ago. I`ll tell you how maya works soon.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Reza for your reply.
Do you know what video card your friends have in their Mac Book Pros? What video card do you have in your computer? I am concerned that the new Mac Book Pros only have the NVIDIA GeForce which supposedly does not work with Maya.
Also please let me know how Leopard works with Maya once you try it out.
Thanks...

Anyone else have any input regarding the NVIDIA GeForce cards with Maya?

[Anonymous]

Thank you Reza for your reply.
Do you know what video card your friends have in their Mac Book Pros? What video card do you have in your computer? I am concerned that the new Mac Book Pros only have the NVIDIA GeForce which supposedly does not work with Maya.
Also please let me know how Leopard works with Maya once you try it out.
Thanks...

Anyone else have any input regarding the NVIDIA GeForce cards with Maya?

Their Mac Book Pros are a little bit old. They have ATI Radeon 1600. I have a Mac Pro with NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT.
The problem with Maya and NVIDIA GeForce is an old one. And personally , I think it has been solved.
I`ve been using Maya since version 4. I always used an ATI video card... But when I bought my Mac Pro it had an NVIDIA GeForce. Those days I was using Maya 7. It sucked! Really sucked! Lot`s of problem with video card. I suddenly upgraded to Maya 8 and all those problems were solved. Maya 2008 works very well with my video card too ...... My computer at work has NVIDIA GeForc 8800 and it works really good with maya.