[njuyhb]

I am working on an OpenGL windows app on a macbook pro 15" rev 3 with the 256 video ram (and the nvidia 8600 gpu.) Recently, I tried running the same program on a dell (tower, not laptop) with less ram, about the same cpu, and only a nvidia 7300 LE graphics card, but the dell clearly shows superior performance under windows (at least for our application.) My question is, is this a fixable problem? Does boot camp come with lousy graphics drivers? (I have upgraded boot camp via the leopard CD.) Can I download better drivers from nvidia, or would that interfere with future boot camp upgrades? Or, could the speed problem be due to something else, like the bus or something?

[mduell]

I would try the latest drivers from nVidia.com instead of the bootcamp drivers. 7300 LE shouldn't be faster than 8600M GT.

Where does your code profiling show the bottlenecks are? If you're CPU or disk bound that would give considerable advantage to the desktop.

[tinkered]

nVida has known issues with OpenGL and the 8000 series. The issue is clearly a driver one, but it forced some devs at my job to switch to either 7000 series cards or ATI.

[njuyhb]

We're definitely CPU bound, but still, given that the macbook has superior hardware in all respects (cpu, graphics, memory), it's strange that the dell performs so much better. Could it be a bus issue? Driver issue? Or just what you get for comparing a laptop to a desktop?

[Tomchu]

When comparing similar-generation graphics cards on a mobile vs. desktop system, the desktop system usually has the advantage of higher clocks/higher memory bandwidth, but in this case, the 7300LE should be well behind the 8600M -- so my vote is on drivers for now as well. :-)