NVIDIA GeForce GT 635M graphics card - Is it good for Maya?

I'm trying to decide on a new laptop for school. I'll be doing a lot of 3d modeling and animating in Maya and 3ds Max, as well as 2D work in the adobe creative suite. I'm looking at this laptop right now:



Asus - 17.3" Laptop - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive + 1TB Hard Drive -

NVIDIA GeForce GT 635M graphics - $1,079



I'm totally fine with the price and space on this laptop, but i don't know if the graphics card will work well enough with Maya and 3ds Max (mostly Maya).



Anyone know more than I do on this?

Well when you are talking modeling and animating are you talking about billions of assets in a large scene needing to all work and play out with complex lighting, or just more of a need to work and edit and add stuff. If the later it will work perfectly fine. Especially with maya, which is going to have you running the rendering tools to generate the scene which can utilize cpu and ram resources to help with the rendering. And the gpu should eaily handle anything you toss at it while working real time, unless as I said you start trying to move hundreds of assets around at a single time.

According to PassMark - G3D Mark:
GeForce GT 635M has a score of only 764;
In comparison an older GeForce GTX 480M has a score of 2078;
So make your conclusions.

You should take in consideration that you will be working on this notebook for a couple of years so it's worth to spend more money (even borrow if you must) and buy something really good and up to the task, otherwise you will have to suffer mediocre performace for the next 700+ days.