[asiafish]

I'd like to see an article comparing common laptop graphics chipsets running common games, with everything else as equal as possible. Unlike desktops, a laptop (except for a few very large desktop-replacement systems, are generally stuck with the graphics it comes with from the cradle to the grave, or box to the dumptser as it may be.

With all of the questions in forums (here and elsewhere) asking which laptop of a given type is suitable for World of Warcraft, Mass Effect 2 or any game it would be nice to see how the graphics chips compare.

This is especially important because the graphics cards in laptops are so confusing. For instance, my last ThinkPad had an ATI Radeon HD 3470 with 256 MB of VRAM. There are plenty of benchmarks out there for various games on the DESKTOP HD 3470, but very little can be found about the mobile version. Often there are significant performance differences from the amount of memory to the clockspeed on mobile GPUs that will drastically slow the gaming experience.

To make it even, try to find systems with the same speed hard drive, same amount of RAM, a bare install of the same OS, latest drivers and the same games installed. My old laptop was smooth playing Mass Effect on medium detail settings, but fell apart at high, while my new one, with exactly the same processor but a better GPU is practically cinematic with the same game on high settings.

Anyone have any experience with this?

[waldojim]

unfortunately laptop graphics do sit very, very far behind...

right now I am looking into a netbook with an ATI 3200, if I can find an external enclosure for the XGP port... the XGP will allow you to use an external PCI-E 8x (2.0) card, and feeds the data back to the integrated display... granted this is not a very portable solution, but it does allow you the best of both worlds as needed.

And the netbook I am looking at uses a dual core processor, 4 GB ram, and still maintains 5 hour battery life.

Now, my point is not trying to push people to netbooks, but rather, XGP port may allow the flexibility people need to achieve high performance in little notebooks.

[smax013]

asiafish, on 01 February 2010 - 04:59 PM, said:

I'd like to see an article comparing common laptop graphics chipsets running common games, with everything else as equal as possible. Unlike desktops, a laptop (except for a few very large desktop-replacement systems, are generally stuck with the graphics it comes with from the cradle to the grave, or box to the dumptser as it may be.

With all of the questions in forums (here and elsewhere) asking which laptop of a given type is suitable for World of Warcraft, Mass Effect 2 or any game it would be nice to see how the graphics chips compare.

This is especially important because the graphics cards in laptops are so confusing. For instance, my last ThinkPad had an ATI Radeon HD 3470 with 256 MB of VRAM. There are plenty of benchmarks out there for various games on the DESKTOP HD 3470, but very little can be found about the mobile version. Often there are significant performance differences from the amount of memory to the clockspeed on mobile GPUs that will drastically slow the gaming experience.

To make it even, try to find systems with the same speed hard drive, same amount of RAM, a bare install of the same OS, latest drivers and the same games installed. My old laptop was smooth playing Mass Effect on medium detail settings, but fell apart at high, while my new one, with exactly the same processor but a better GPU is practically cinematic with the same game on high settings.

Anyone have any experience with this?

I suspect the part in red is why you do not see many comparisons. With a desktop graphics card, it is easier to compare graphics cards because you can basically use the same system (CPU, RAM amount, motherboard, etc) so that the only variable is the graphics card. With a laptop, you are much more likely to introduce other "variables into the equation", so to speak.

[asiafish]

waldojim, on 01 February 2010 - 06:30 PM, said:

unfortunately laptop graphics do sit very, very far behind...

right now I am looking into a netbook with an ATI 3200, if I can find an external enclosure for the XGP port... the XGP will allow you to use an external PCI-E 8x (2.0) card, and feeds the data back to the integrated display... granted this is not a very portable solution, but it does allow you the best of both worlds as needed.

And the netbook I am looking at uses a dual core processor, 4 GB ram, and still maintains 5 hour battery life.

Now, my point is not trying to push people to netbooks, but rather, XGP port may allow the flexibility people need to achieve high performance in little notebooks.

I think we still should have some solid reviews and comparisons of laptop cards, because most laptop owners don't want to modify and plug in a bunch of stuff, just to know which games will play how well on which settings when they go to buy a laptop, or the games to run on it.

I use a high-end Apple MacBook Pro. Trying to cut into that unibody enclosure is not an option, but knowing which games will run how well on the nVidia 9600M GT with 512 MB VRAM would be great information before ordering a game. The games themselves list minimum and recommended specs, but those relate to desktop versions of the cards, not laptop versions.

A good example is the 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3470 card in my previous laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad T400. I bought a few games that listed lesser ATI cards under the Recommended and far lower ATI cards under minimum, but I still had to play the game at low-medium settings for it to be playable. Exceeding the recommended card by a full generation and the other specs by almost double should have given me a wonderful experience on medium or even high settings. Other games listed cards similar to that ATI 3470 as the minimum, so I bought expecting to run on low graphics, but was pleasantly surprised when the game was nice and fast (newer drivers?).

The point is, there just isn't any reliable information on the difference between laptop and desktop versions of the same card. Perhaps a shootout between mobile and desktop versions so we would know that the laptop GeForce 9600M GT is 20%, or 40% or whatever fixed amount slower than the desktop version.

[asiafish]

smax013, on 01 February 2010 - 10:57 PM, said:

asiafish, on 01 February 2010 - 04:59 PM, said:

I'd like to see an article comparing common laptop graphics chipsets running common games, with everything else as equal as possible. Unlike desktops, a laptop (except for a few very large desktop-replacement systems, are generally stuck with the graphics it comes with from the cradle to the grave, or box to the dumptser as it may be.

With all of the questions in forums (here and elsewhere) asking which laptop of a given type is suitable for World of Warcraft, Mass Effect 2 or any game it would be nice to see how the graphics chips compare.

This is especially important because the graphics cards in laptops are so confusing. For instance, my last ThinkPad had an ATI Radeon HD 3470 with 256 MB of VRAM. There are plenty of benchmarks out there for various games on the DESKTOP HD 3470, but very little can be found about the mobile version. Often there are significant performance differences from the amount of memory to the clockspeed on mobile GPUs that will drastically slow the gaming experience.

To make it even, try to find systems with the same speed hard drive, same amount of RAM, a bare install of the same OS, latest drivers and the same games installed. My old laptop was smooth playing Mass Effect on medium detail settings, but fell apart at high, while my new one, with exactly the same processor but a better GPU is practically cinematic with the same game on high settings.

Anyone have any experience with this?

I suspect the part in red is why you do not see many comparisons. With a desktop graphics card, it is easier to compare graphics cards because you can basically use the same system (CPU, RAM amount, motherboard, etc) so that the only variable is the graphics card. With a laptop, you are much more likely to introduce other "variables into the equation", so to speak.

Yes, there will be other variables, but we can come close. Comparing three Core2Duo laptops with the same 2.53 GHz clockspeed, 5400 or 7200 RPM drives and the same 2 or 4 GB of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM would do much to normalize the rest of the test. It shouldn't matter too much (more than a few percentage points) whether the laptop is a Dell or a Lenovo or an Apple or Sony if the processor, drive and RAM are the same, and we can reasonably expect that the biggest difference will be the different graphics cards, especially when testing framerates on games where the GPU is the most important component.