Hi ShadowIce,
I would hazard a guess that you only find L3DT running badly is because the other programs you use are either running a different version of OpenGL, or DirectX, and won't be affected by your card having poorly optimised OpenGL 1/2 drivers. Sapphire mostly uses features from older OpenGL standards (1.4 and 2.1, mostly). New games that use OpenGL will be using 4.0 or later, and this is what card vendors test for when developing drivers for their new cards. Relatively few people buy top of the line cards to use older software, so the first release of drivers for new cards often have limited backwards compatibility or limited optimisations for old versions of OpenGL. Some time later, after enough people have reported faults to the card vendors, they develop more complete drivers to fix these sorts of obscure problems. You can see some examples of this occurring in
these two forums threads, where the up to date drivers for new cards were causing Sapphire to misbehave or crash, which were then fixed some time later by the vendor issuing better drivers. I myself had some stuttering performance in Sapphire when I last updated my graphics card (a long time ago, mind you), but fortunately for me NVIDIA were pretty quick at fixing their drivers in my case.
Now, you can view this in two ways. Either NVIDIA is at fault because their current drivers for your card are not doing a very good job with OpenGL 1.4-2.1 function calls. Or, it's my fault, because my program is using OpenGL 1.4-2.1 function calls. Maybe it's both mine and NVIDIAs fault.
But what to do about it? Well, NVIDIA will probably release updated drivers for your card that will fix this problem, at some point. I have no real idea how long that will take, but I'd guess a couple of months at the outside. It's probably no real priority for them, as the number of customers of theirs who are reporting problems with OpenGL 2-era software would be a tiny fraction of a percent. I too will probably re-write Sapphire at some point to use the more modern flavours of OpenGL, or build an entirely new rendering plugin. This I can assure you that won't happen very soon, as it's a huge job, I don't have much development time, and the number of users of L3DT that are reporting problems with NVIDIA drivers is also a fraction of a percent (i.e. you, out of several thousand). I'm not going to prioritise the rewriting of the 3D renderer because, by the time I'd have finished the changes and debugged it, after much effort, for one user, with no new features or benefits for anyone else, NVIDIA will probably have fixed the driver problem for you, so my effort would be wasted.
Now, having said I won't fix this problem, I will of course provide you with a full refund if you feel that running L3DT on your laptop is unacceptable. Please let me know, and I'll set the refund machinery in motion.
Best regards,
Aaron.