Spinning part is jerky when too many parts opened

[warmwinds]

I am running proe 2001 on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. Does anyone know of the optimal screen and/or system settings to maximize the number of parts opened before spinning the part becomes jerky? With the screen resolution set to 1680 x 1050 and the color quality set to 32 bits the 5th part opened will become jerky when spinning. With the screen resolution set to 1280 x 800 and color quality set to 16 bits, the 10th part opened will become jerky when spinning. I expected to be able to open 15 parts without any problems as I have done in the past on older Dell desktops with less horsepower.

 

[eServ]

You need a better graphics card. I've had that problem before.

 

[noppenbd]

From my experience, the number of windows that can be simultaneously opened depends largely on the video card and associated video RAM. Maybe your other machines had better cards...



Anyway, why would you want to open 15 windows at a time? That seems like a recipe for confusion... I get confused with more than 5 or so.

 

[warmwinds]

The newer graphics card in the Dell notebook is a 64 MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 4200 Go. The older graphics card in the Dell desktop is a 64 MB ELSA Gloria II Pro with a NV10GL chip set. Obviously size isn't everything.



I don't think I can easily change the graphics card in the notebook. I'm not even sure if it is integrated or stand alone.



Both systems have 512 MB RAM but I wonder if more RAM in the notebook would help?

 

[Brian_Adkins]

Check out some hardware review sites for some benchmark stuff. I recommend http://www.anandtech.com and http://www.tomshardware.com



Even though you've technically got a FeForce 4 4200 in your notebook, the mobile cards are always lacking compared to their desktop counterparts due to power consumption issues.



Also, even though your desktop's card may be slightly out of date compared to the notebook, it is configured as a 'professional' card while the newer consumer cards often have some of the high-end OpenGL functionality disabled. This topic has been discussed on the exploder recently.



http://www.ptcuser.org/exploder/pro-user/200308/msg00081.html

http://www.ptcuser.org/exploder/sysmgt/200303/msg00052.html



From http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1144 :

NVIDIA's Quadro GPU ( NV10GL) is set apart from the consumer grade GeForce (aside from it

 

[warmwinds]

Wow! Great information. Thanks. I should have researched more before I bought. It sounds like a few Pro-e users are living with poor graphics card performance.



I have also found that when spinning becomes jerky because too many parts are opened, toggling the color quality seems to reset something so that the active part spins smoothly.



I'm curious how the Inspiron 8600 with the 128MB NVIDIA Geforce FX Go 5650 is performing with these graphics problems.