T41p and gaming development

[Seiko]

Not sure really if this should have been posted under the drivers forum but as it is development related I thought I'd post here. Basically I wanted to ask if anyone is developing using either an IBM Thinkpad R50p or T41p with ATI's FireGL T2? We have a couple of T41ps arriving and I wanted to ask whether it's best to develop using the FireGL drivers or Catylist? As we currently develop on 9700Pros using Catylist would it be safer to switch to them on the laptops? The laptops by the way are simply for demonstration/portable development roles but will hopefully have the grunt to run our shaders etc?

Again, apologies if this is slightly off topic but as it is a development style question I opted for this forum.

BTW, I did try and post in Rage3D as they do have a dedicated FireGL forum but alas that place has seen better days. BTW, I'll fire off a question to ATI dev rel but again I'm hoping for a quicker response here.

Any feedback or user experience would be great!

Many thanks,

[ERP]

I use a T41p when I work at home, or elsewhere. But I'm not a PC developer, I only use the FireGL card for experimenting with shaders. I use the latest version of the drivers from IBM's site (If it aint broke and all that). There was a nasty bug where it would sometimes just freeze up during graphics intensive operations, but one of the firmware downloads appears to have fixed that.

Overall it works pretty well, compile times are much better than my other laptop (probably because of the 7200rpm harddrive), and the battery life is stellar (although you pay for it with preformance in the conservative modes).

The only issue as a demo box is that fillrate is poor, and the native resolution is high. You should be fine if your using an external monitor though. It also runs hot if you do a lot of 3D work.



Not sure really if this should have been posted under the drivers forum but as it is development related I thought I'd post here. Basically I wanted to ask if anyone is developing using either an IBM Thinkpad R50p or T41p with ATI's FireGL T2? We have a couple of T41ps arriving and I wanted to ask whether it's best to develop using the FireGL drivers or Catylist? As we currently develop on 9700Pros using Catylist would it be safer to switch to them on the laptops? The laptops by the way are simply for demonstration/portable development roles but will hopefully have the grunt to run our shaders etc?

Again, apologies if this is slightly off topic but as it is a development style question I opted for this forum.

BTW, I did try and post in Rage3D as they do have a dedicated FireGL forum but alas that place has seen better days. BTW, I'll fire off a question to ATI dev rel but again I'm hoping for a quicker response here.

Any feedback or user experience would be great!

Many thanks,

[Seiko]

Thanks ERP,
Other than the low fillrate you mention it sounds good. BTW, do you know the Clock/mem speed of the FireGL T2? Also, dare I mention this, have you tried any gaming? Not that we'd use the companies development machines for gaming of course ;)

[ERP]

I play DAOC on it occasionally, but I don't play much in the way of PC titles, so I can't comment on more recent titles.

Not sure what the clock and memory speeds on the FireGL are, I've never really cared enough to look :)