Quadro FX 1600m = Gaming?

[thatredguy15]

Hey, I've enrolled into Fullsail's Game Development program and am going to be recieving a 8710w "CTO spec" (w/e that means) and it comes with a 1.8 Core 2 Duo, 1gb Memory, and a Quadro 1600m (claiming to have 512 dedicated graphics memory). On the HP site it says this model starts @ $2.4k and the school is charging about $1.2k for it.

I've noticed that the CPU isn't that spectacular and I know the memory is upgradeable, but is that Graphics card able to do well playing games? I'm sure it's great in 3dmax and w/e but I demand gaming performance!!

Anyone know? Is it worth the reduced cost? Thanks in advance.

 

[sulanebouxi]

I know some games don't support Quadro cards so you might get some weird graphical glitches with them. Either that or they'll just plain crash whenever you start it. It's happened before when a friend of mine played Splinter Cell on her machine. However some games are fine so...your mileage may vary.

 

[Modelworks]

3dsMax can do direct3d or opengl modes for display.
But if your going to do game development then your probably going to keep the viewports in d3d since it allows you to see DX shaders in realtime viewports.
That way you can tell exactly how something will appear in the game engine.

You really do need a faster cpu with max and 1gb memory can be frustrating to use unless you keep scenes small.
I would look for something with as fast a cpu and as much memory as I could.
Add on a 7900GT card or 8x00 if you want to do dx10, although 3dsmax dx10 support is still in beta.
Either of those cards work fine in 3dsmax despite being "gaming" cards.

 

[PCTC2]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
3dsMax can do direct3d or opengl modes for display.
But if your going to do game development then your probably going to keep the viewports in d3d since it allows you to see DX shaders in realtime viewports.
That way you can tell exactly how something will appear in the game engine.

You really do need a faster cpu with max and 1gb memory can be frustrating to use unless you keep scenes small.
I would look for something with as fast a cpu and as much memory as I could.
Add on a 7900GT card or 8x00 if you want to do dx10, although 3dsmax dx10 support is still in beta.
Either of those cards work fine in 3dsmax despite being "gaming" cards.

he's getting a laptop... sort of hard to upgrade graphics on laptops.

 

[Modelworks]

sorry didn't see the word laptop mentioned and missed the m on the quadro card.

 

[Laminator]

According to the Notebook Review forums, Quadro 1600M = GeForce 8700M GT, which is a little slower than the desktop GeForce 8600GTS.