What are the 9.2 graphics requirements
I am in the market for a new laptop. My sticking point is that I have no idea what the graphics requirements will be for ArcGIS 9.2. I would prefer to save money and buy a laptop with shared video memory as opposed to spending significantly more for a dedicated graphics card. However, since I tend to use my laptop as my primary machine I will shell out the extra cash if 9.2 does a better job of pushing graphics processes to the GPU than previous versions…which I thought I heard would be the case (though I can’t remember where).
Could someone from ESRI or a beta tester give me a hint as to how the graphics in 9.2 compare to 9.1, does more of the graphics rendering get offloaded to the GPU or does the CPU still feel the brunt of the work. Feel free to leave a comment or email.
Thanks in advance.
3 Replies to “What are the 9.2 graphics requirements”
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As a GIS pro who uses a laptop as his primary “workstation” I’ve learned the following about ArcGIS and laptops.
1. Get the fastest hard drive you can get. Sacrafice size for speed!
2. Maximise your RAM. 2GB is almost a requirement on a laptop. On laptops without 2GB of RAM, I notice ArcMap does run slower.
3. As long as the video is not integrated, you should be fine. I’ve got a Dell Precision M70 with a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 (256 megs of RAM) that doesn’t seem to give much more performance than the old 128 meg card on my C610. Yes I do notice it with ArcGlobe and ArcScene, but not with ArcMap.
The fact that you notice a significant difference with ArcScene and ArcGlobe kind of surprises me as I have found that my current laptop with a NVidia 4200 2go with 32mb of dedicated graphics performs as well as a desktop with NVidia 6800 or even Quadro with 256MB (and comparable CPU and memory). This comparison is with projects that actually require significant texture memory. I can say I have seen differences between NVidia and ATI cards, but that is seperate issue.
Anyway, your suggestions are the ones that I share with others (it is nice that we can at least get 100GB at 7200RPM) but I still wish ESRI would make the recommended system requirements available before launch so that we can get a better sense of what they have done under the hood with the new cartigraphic layers and, of course, ArcGIS Explorer.
I am going to stop fighting destiny…I will probably get a MacBook Pro the weekend after they release a Core 2 Duo version. I will try to run a page on the site detailing the journey once it begins looking at the installation of Parallels and 9.2 once it is released and a few other windows only packages (Imagine, MapInfo, QGIS, etc) and see how well they work in a virtual machine. I will also try to cover the MacOS versions of a few GIS packages (GRASS, QGIS, MicroImages TNT, etc). Perhaps the one I look forward to most is setting up a WMS in MacOS and accessing it in the XP virtual machine using ArcMap or the like…that should probably make the dual core chip start to shudder 🙂