Sorry i just don't agree with what you're saying. nVidia do NOT have better OpenGL drivers than ATI. Barefeats have proved this.
The then two year old x1900 ATi card ran better than the then new 8800 nVidia card. But aside from that, the GPU is not the most important part of a computer when running maya. No rendering gets passed off to the GPU it is the CPU that takes the brunt of the work in maya - ust open your resources manager and see. a 4 core machine renders 4 times quicker than a single core. By your logic a 4 card machine would render 4 times quicker than a single card machine which is obviously not true.
the amount of Video card RAM is immensly important. The more the better, if you do any modern visual effects work you must surely know this?
How else are you buffering those particles, fluids and textures??
The ideal system for me at the moment (if it has to be mac) would be the 8 core 3.0Ghz system with a 3870 ATi card and about 8GB of RAM.
PS - you don't happen to work for nVidia do you?
Sorry, let me clear up a few things... What I was refering to the ability of using maya in the new mac notebooks (if you had read what the thread and subject is about you would know what we were talking about, we were NOT talking the ultimate / ideal setup for running Maya).
The typical problem people have with buying Mac notebooks and running maya is the gfx card. Even an old macbook will render fine, the cpu is not typically the issue with compatibility.
Thats what I meant being the gfx card more important than the cpu. Not the cpu is not important. Most modern notebook CPU can run Maya fine. But usually the gfx card is what prevents Maya from running smoothly or without display glitches.
We were talking about notebook so I already assume this is for portable use, not full blown production usage... I wouldn't suggest using any notebook for real work. If someone wanted to do a big fluid sim or use a notebook for intense rendering, then I would tell them to forget about it, we were talking within the bounds for portable notebooks. I never mention anything about doing rendering or fluid sim specifically in my post. I am talking about general interaction and usage within the viewport. Any CPU will render fine, you are not going to find a notebook that can't render for you, but you will find notebook that can't run your maya session because of the gfx card it has.. That is really what I meant. If someone wants to get a notebook as a desktop replacement, then that is a different story and I didn't think that was the point of the post.. The original post asked about the "macbook"! I wouldn't recommend it anyway if they were doing complex 3d work with it.
So for the most part I agree with you, except the ATI video card running better than Nvidia. I have never used an ATI video card that ran more stable and faster than an nvidia video card in doing opengl 3d work. Specifically in maya. I haven't used the latest video cards from ATI so that I don't know. But I have always ran into glitches and display issues with ATI cards running maya and its even worse on OSX. Thats my experience, I would be happy if it was like you said, ATI worked just as well or better than Nvidia cards in running these opengl apps and I would love to be proved wrong. But in my experience, nvidia, even their pretty low end cards will run Maya more stable with less glitches than ATI cards.
I was just setting up a 43k poly character on my new Macbook Air and even to my surprise, it ran fine, painting worked solid and good, the character animated in real time... For what the macbook air is, I am really impressed.
P.S. Particles and Fluid sims don't necessary get buffer from the video card ram. If you were using the same video card, one has 512mb and one has 1gb and you were running the same particle simulations, would you see the bigger ram video card run faster or can run more particles in the scene, no. Most particles / sims in most 3d apps still don't take a lot of advantage of GPUs unfortunately.. If you had more ram in the machine and a 64bit OS, then yes. I have seen that. Textures, typically yes, they do use the video card ram a lot, and hence why I said if someone were doing heavy 3d work, heavy models and textures, the extra video card ram will make a more significant difference.
P.P.S. You don't happen to work for ATI right?
