Well, my suggestion for you for lappie MAX is a PC. why?
Mac Book Pro is quite fast using Sandy Bridge CPU, But now it uses Radeon instead Nvidia.
With Radeon you cannot utilized GPU CUDA Nvidia Based acceleration render like iRay, Octane Render GPU and Physix acceleration. Yes you can use OpenCL GPU render like VrayRT or gpuRat, but the result for Radeon is not quite satisfying.

For mac i suggest using BootCamp, please forget using Virtualization like Parallels or other VMs, because the hardware GPU acceleration not will perform 100% in VM environment. It’s not the RAM bottleneck, it is GPU bottleneck. 3ds max uses directX, so i think is a very long way to see it to be native like Autocad Mac using OpenGL.
BTW, You can use latest macbookpro with Radeon, but you cannot use GPU CUDA acceleration render, and physix.

Several PC notebooks also use Radeon since it cheaper and less wattage for notebook comparing to Nvidia.Get some Acceleration with DDR3 capable for 4GB each slot (usually 2 slots so you can get 8GB), Get some nvidia GPU like 330M or brand new 500 series, and i7 Sandy Bridge notebooks with 8GB DDR3 ram.

Having just buried one 3 year old laptop, and having a Toshiba that is 2 yrs old and the screen is already wonky...reliability was HUGE for me or I wouldnt have even considered Mac.

Having said that, I bought a Dell XPS 17 with 8gig RAM, a 555m Nvidia card, etc....here is hoping that card will be somewhat Nitrous friendly.  I finally went that way when I built one with a cool feature--a four year warranty on everything.  At four years it is probably time for a new one anyway...this one might break, but i will have no unexpected bills.

Anyone havr experience with the XPS with that 555m card?  I posted other places but no real responses

Jim Todd
Coloma, MI
(home of Deer Forest!!!)

Well, i just know the 3ds max 2012 uses nitrous, a kind new graphics API, not between OpenGL and DirectX world. Completely new built up from DX9.How good it is tuned using Nvidia, Radeon, or high end certified cards, i don’t know. sound as fast as Dx9 in 3ds max 2009.

Last year Macbookpro has 330m Nvidia, this year is Radeon.
@phloog If you abuse the notebook, be sure has a notebook pad cooling device, or The 3D GPU can be has nasty artefacts.

Dell XPS 17 with 8gig RAM, a 555m 3GB Nvidia card looks overkill.

On completely unrelated note to Max- Adobe Premiere cs5 allows you to use your CUDA GPU and render 4k videos in real time. I seriously doubt final cut getting there anywhere near it in this decade.

Just one more reason to forget about Macs for anything other than blogging, since they cant really game well either…

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

Ok, I’ve read the article you linked to. I viewed the video that the article linked to in 2 parts and I just have to say that it does sound nice. So nice that it sounds like something coming out of apple pr department. 0 tech specs and all magic. Let me give you an example:

So does the new FCP debut a dozen never-before-seen features? Maybe not. But the magic of software comes in allowing people to do complicated things in the most simple manner possible.

Is it true? Maybe? Is it likely? I’d rather not speculate. The only way to be sure is to check it out when it ships in June. I, for one, will not be able to test/verify any of their claims.

You mention speed of hard drives as a relevant thing. Thats a tech spec. Something I havent gotten used to Mac people to understand. I found that most of them figures things run on apple magic juice and not on real world elements. My original CUDA=awesome post was a shot at oversimplifying.

In the video the guy did very briefly mention fast rendering and OpenCL very near each other. That sounds great. If it does work, it will be the first real world example of it that I know of. AFAIK OpenCL is paperware. This is the reason software companies (other than apple) turn to nvidia and CUDA for GPU accelerated tasks. It is actually written, stable and usable- right now.

Am I skeptical? Very. However, I’ll take my hat off to apple if they actually did implement openCL that works on ati and nvidia alike. Thats something I was sure would take them a couple of years to get to. Taking a graphical/computing initiative is so very unstevejobslike.

I dont know smoke. However, if smoke is anything like flame ,its really bad. Just now getting tools that After Effects had for over 5 years. I dont know what else to add.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.