XP pro sp3
32 bit
cpu Intel T2400
directX 9
2 Gig RAM
Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 256 mem
45 Gig free space

Motionbuilder 2010 and 7.5 run like pigs on my laptop. I have a feeling that it is a graphic/card driver, open gl direct x problem as no app can run this poorly. Doing anything significant crashes the app. Reading I saw my requirements (for 7.5 at least) were above the asking price. Rotating a cube in the viewport works fine, a simple skeleton and the display jigs like a maniac. Any advice as to what I could try would be appreciated. On the home machine MB runs great, but I need it to work on the laptop too for site work. Googling the problem hasn’t helped much. Drivers are most recent.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

The problems are most likely related to running with an untested and unqualified card/driver. I’ve previously run MotionBuilder on a laptop with mobile Video card and have seen similar viewport playback/refresh issues:-

Autodesk MotionBuilder – Qualified Hardware-

http://www.autodesk.com/motionbuilder-hardware

If you check the readmefirst link from above, there is a disclaimer related to running with GeForce cards. There is also a link to Nvidia White Paper on Quadro vs. GeForce GPU’s-

http://download.autodesk.com/us/qualcharts/2010/hwqual_readmefirst.pdf

‘’NVIDIA®, AMD™ and Autodesk® recommend the use of professional workstation cards such as the Quadro® and FireGL/FirePro™ families which provide optimal user experience for high-end 3D packages. Various refresh, display and stability problems as well as inadequate performance may be encountered with cards based on the GeForce® /Radeon GPU chipset, and therefore Autodesk cannot guarantee their behavior. Please refer to the NVIDIA Quadro vs. GeForce GPUs White Paper’’

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html

You might be able to work-around the problems by installing alternative driver from Nvidia or modifying the settings for the driver, though as the setup is not officially tested or qualified by Autodesk you won’t be fully supported. You should also test toggling between the different Viewer display modes when first starting MB- i.e. with nothing selected hit Ctr+A several times to toggle Viewer mode- I found that helped when running on laptop with un-tested card.

Best Regards,

Lee

double post

Thanks Lee I guess that about nails it.
Will try the fix it, the rest makes sense however.

Cheers

I have tested a bunch of laptops with MotionBuilder. I have had good success with my Sony laptop that has 1 GIG DEDICATED ram radeon 4650. And now my IBM Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 with 1 GIG RAM DEDICATED nVidia Geforce GT 240M graphic card. The lenovo is very cheap with their specials they always seem to have at the lenovo website. I paid around 800.00 with the 1 GIG dedicated video ram and windows 7 64 bit etc. I think having the 1 GIG dedicated/discrete video ram really does help run MB on my laptop.

Hey thanks growthweb.

That’s usefull to know :)

Cheers

Hi,

Try this:

Go to the nVidia control panel - 3D Settings.
Create a custom setting for motionbuilder (for std the actual exe is std.exe)
Turn off Threaded Optimization
Set texture filtering - quality to Performance
Vert sync off

// for dual screen

Multipsdisplay gpu accel to Single display performance

Cheers,

Marc