yup. this is normal. whats going wrong is, you are using a laptop, probably.

first off, look at your ram. how much is the machine using up just idling with no programs running. then look at the actual speed and grade of your ram. two gigs of ram is not a lot.

second. remember that laptop hardware is underpowered in comparison to their desktop namesakes. thats the accepted loss when miniturising for laptops. you have to down the power, to account for the smaller size and less cooling. 

 

thirdly, a quatro is not neciserily a more powerful card than the fx series. in fact comparing them directly , the quatro series usually looks quite weak, compared to a lot of the gaming  cards. the whole point of a quatro is not that it will push more polys. it is that the quatro will be more stable and dependable, and have better driver support for open gl rendering etc etc. 

 

fourthly, are you comparing the same 1mil poly model? the actual number of polys is pretty meaningless. a badly built model with loads of tris ngons, and too-long quads, will drop the performance of your app far quicker than an evenly and cleanly meshed model.

lastly. if you have a model of about 1 mil polys, then odds are good that you need to re-think how you model. "lots of polys" is not how to make things well. split your model up. only put geometry where it is needed, and learn to use layers to hide the parts of the model you are working on. 

 

p.s. are you running vista? if so, its not helping matters. 

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