Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Gaming At Desktop Speeds
DigitalBiscuit writes: "Today's leading edge laptop PCs are packing serious power under their thin
little hoods, enough that even the hard core gamer may sit up and take note.
Here's a full showcase (dismantled to show you the innards) with benchmarks on a
Dell unit that employs NVIDIA's new GeForce4 440 Go GPU and a Pentium 4M (mobile) processor at 1.6GHz. Take one of these babies to the local LAN meet and be the envy of your Mountain Dew chugging cohorts." Of course, this will cost a lot more than similarly powerful desktop, but some people don't seem to mind that tradeoff.
I don't know - every time I see a laptop that has any type of gaming performance, it's 3 steps behind the best desktop and costs a chunk more.
For $2500, I can get a Athlon 2100+ system with a G4. Where are you going to find a laptop that can match that? The 3Dmark of a G4 TI 4400 can hit 10000, the G4 440 can only hit 5000.
Laptops simply can't dissapate the heat.
Plus, for real gamers, you are stuck with the base configuration. Maybe you can add more memory, but that's it. No new MB, limited OC, and no new video card.
This is a solution for a gamer with an open budget. While it can sure play the top games of today, it will be a slug on the next generation of games.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I think you're probably trolling, but you're missing the point. It's nice that you can get the same chip for Apple desktops and laptops, but it doesn't matter if the chip isn't up to par with what you need. Sure, Apple's chips run Altivec-optimized Photoshop routines quickly, but for things that actually matter to me like kernel compiles, mp3 encoding, or gaming, a P4 1.5 Ghz laptop is going to run 3 times as fast as your 500 Mhz G4.
Is your browser retarded?
That's nice and all, but the need for a quad processor game machine died when 3D accellerated games came out. Now the cards are the bottleneck, not the processor.
"Derp de derp."
"but for things that actually matter to me like kernel compiles, mp3 encoding, or gaming, a P4 1.5 Ghz laptop is going to run 3 times as fast as your 500 Mhz G4."
Faster, maybe, but not 3 times faster; not even close to 3 times faster. Apples and oranges when comparing Pentiums and G4s.
Besides, when talking about buying a laptop, you'd be hard-pressed to get a 500 Mhz from Apple now. It's 667 Mhz on the low end of the Powerbooks, and 800 on the high end. And no, that doesn't mean your 1.5 P4 is now merely twice as fast as the 800, as my previous paragraph states.
There are other arguments that can be made in this area, but comparing clock speeds is not as relevant as it was years ago when upgrading from one Intel chip to another Intel chip.