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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.
One thing that mobile laptops will not be able to do is to match the power consumption required for good 3D cards.
Asynchronous might be the key with low power, super pipelining, high throughput or low delay.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I hate to keep on these 25 year-old guys living in thier parents basements, but maybe this will get these guys outside. They can sit on the lawn and play quake 3. Or go to the bar and play quake 3. Or sit on the can and play quake 3...
OR TAKE A SHOWER DAMNIT!!!
Linux is dead.
LU
Somthing a year old, or a cool animated lucas arts game BY URSELF. I am not up for waiting for a year for a maybe port of a cool game to Apple. :)
I've a small form factor case witha happy hacker keyboard that is ALMOST laptop size, goes in my backpack along with my change of clothes and uber caff drink. All I need to worry about is a monitor, and thats the same problem on any laptop as well, the cost for mine, 900$
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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 have a laptop that sports a GeForce chip and it does run games nicely. However, trying to play any serious LAN game on a 15" LCD can be very frustrating. In fact, after a couple of hours my eyes completely bug out.
So, I am still gonna gear grip pro my case and monitor to LAN parties, and take my laptop for someone who shows up empty-handed...
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
Use the P4 and Geforce 4 to crank up high frame rates and burn the ever living crap out of the guy next to you. Finally, a real reaosn to have a P4.
Also makes suitcase nukes a whole lot easier to build.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Being one of the estimated ten people to actually read an article posted on Slashdot, I see that the only thing actually said about battery life is this:
Battery life is also excellent due in part to the Pentium 4M Speedstep technology. We were actually able to watch 2 full DVD titles on this machine, before the battery alert came on.
I know this article was mainly to see the performance of a current laptop, but couldn't they have given us an exact time, at least, to show what you need to sacrifice for higher laptop performance? Plus how many batteries was that with? I know the unit can hold two batteries with the DVD-ROM. If both batteries were in the unit at the time that isn't very impressive, especially if they were short "DVD titles" (notice they didn't say movies). Sorry, but I am really annoyed by ambiguous statements.
You got a nicer setup than I do, so I'm not trying to give you a hard time or anything, but I just think it's funny that you think your rig would r0x0r anyones b0x0rz at a hardcore LAN party.
I've got a laptop with a GeForce 2 Go and a Mobile PIII 933MHz CPU, and, sure, it's got the power to play games, but the issue is always the display. It's the same with any flat screen...the pixels have a hard time turning off, so whenever the sceen changes quickly, it blurs. So, you may have the hardware, but if the display stinks, what's the point? You'd have to hook it up to a monitor anyway, and if you're bringing along the monitor, you might as well bring along the rest of the box, too. Until laptop displays improve, there isn't much point in playing fast-moving games like FPSs on them.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Okay, all you 1337 G33ks running over to Dell to see what that rig costs, cut it out! I can't configure mine! :P
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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?
As far back as Accolade Grand Prix on a CGA monitor, I have been subconciously angling with the screen to take corners with the car.
Now if you too suffer this affliction, then you'll know playing a game like this on a bus to work could be fucking disastrous:
The bus driver turns a corner, you angle to take an imaginary corner with the "car" and... BOOM... both you and your laptop are in the aisle.
:)
For year I've been under the impression that LCD screens simply don't cut it for serious gaming and that most hardcore FPS players still rely on their trusty CRTs. I gather that the problem was primarily one of there being a slightly slower reaction time and lower refresh rates.
Possibly there have been advances in this area that I haven't heard about; anyone know what the current wisdom is on this?
And is it realistic for us to be talking about serious gamers switching over to laptops if this vital component is not yet up to par?
I'd play DOOM in the woods alone in the summer at night
Nice idea, doesn't work to well in practice, just think of the clouds of insects that will gather between your face and the glowing screen...
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.
I just bought one of these puppies last week. I'm chomping at the bit for it to arrive now :)
:)
Been completely mobile for years (no desktop), and the only thing I ever really had complaints about were the video cards. I won't be worrying about that anymore, evidently
Curious: Are you referring to the Voodoo 2 cards a while back? If so, I'm pretty sure that type of processing went extinct.
Heh that'd be cool if they still did that though. (Perhaps they do and I'm just unaware of it. heh.)
"Derp de derp."
Given how everyone always trumpets how fast their extreme gaming systems are, it's sad we don't here more about extreme slow gaming.
Sure, playing through Quake at 180 fps is cool, but winning Quake at 5 fps, ah, now that's a challenge.
My greatest act of low-powered gaming was winning Unreal on a PowerBook G3 300. This was MacOS 8.6 or so, with manual memory management and everything. I had to create a custom Extensions set boot mode to even get enough free memory to launch Unreal.
The two most challenging aspect were graphics and controls. The Rage Pro was very aenemic, and I was lucky to get 15 fps out of it. And I had to use hardware scaling, since the LCD was 1024x768, and the card could barely do 3D at 640x480. Also, it had to run in 16-bit mode, which those old ATI card had huge dithering problems in. So it was kind of like watching a blocky yet blurred filmstrip in a snowstorm.
Controls? Well, of course, the keyboard and, wait for it, the trackpad! No mouse for me! If you haven't played through a first person shooter using a trackpad for aim, you haven't lived, at least not lived badly.
The nice thing about this is that you can play in bed when your girlfriend is asleep. The startling thing was she actually married me even after that.
My video compression blog
The usual reason is lower production cost, followed by lower power consumption. And of course if its a low power chip, they might clock it lower also. Embedded RAM theoretically can have much wider bandwidth, but for the most part it hasn't been used that way.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Many LAN parties are at predictable or regular locations. For the price of a laptop you could buy a better desktop and several monitors and leave extra monitors with the friends that host the LAN parties.
:/ I've had that happen at home.
now I check how clean my roommates are before I let them move in..
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
I should tell you that I've taken to doing all my gaming on my laptop because my desktop has some hardware problems and I haven't gotten around to fixing them. So while it's no GeForce 3, it works great. My gaming consists mostly of Counter-Strike. It runs at 1024x768, almost always at 60 FPS. The smoke gernades slow it down, but what do you expect. I should note that the 60 is my refresh rate, and I run Win 2k so it probably maxes out higher. The LCD screen is GREAT and you can see things very well. I doesn't blur during action and such. The only problem is it's impossible to play FPSs with a pointstick or touchpad, so I keep a USB mouse handy. But what do you expect?
The laptop does get warm after alot of CSing, but I'm not suprised. It's not hot at all, and doesn't seem to effect anything. When it does get hot the fan(s) come on, but they are quite quiet and you can't hear them over the game unless you keep it quiet.
Basically what I'm saying is that for what I do (gameing wise), the GeForce 2 GO works great. Considering that this is basically a GeForce 2 MX or so, I'd like to see the GeForce 4 GO, which is basically a neutered GeForce 3. Things are great on the 2D side too. And, yes, I've played Quake 3 and such a few times and it works great as well. No, you're not going to get 200 FPS with 4x AA at 1400x1050 (the native resolution), but then again, it IS a laptop. I should also point out that I game with my AC adapter, not having it might trigger the power miser stuff and slow the GPU down, I don't know.
While I'm on the subject, I'll also point out that the LCD looks great in ANY resolution. I doesn't look like it's been cheesily stretched (like my old Winbook did), it looks like it's the native resolution. But if you don't like it, there is a hot key that displays the image 1:1 on the screen, centered, with a black border around it for non-native resolutions if you want. I prefer full screen (which is nice on a 15" laptop).
In summary, these things work great. I've never tried the ATI, but I bet it would be just as good if not better (but I don't like ATI, and that's another discussion). Before this, my laptop gaming was limited to SimCity 3000, The Incredible Machine, Solitare, and other 2D games. Now I can do all that and headshot people in Counter-Strike from a hotel room without one of those lanboxes-in-a-suitcase.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I have a Dell 8100, it rocks, but you know what would rock even more on these beasts? It's almost a workstation replacement, I can do most 3D setup that I need prior to rendering, I can even do some test rendering on it too with heavy features like radiosity and caustics, I never though I'd see the day when a company would have such decent 3d performance on a mobile platform, for both previewing (opengl) and rendering.
;).
One thing that I would kill for, and that's about the only "workstation" thing missing, (and don't laugh) would be a IDE raid-0. Battery consumption is not an issue, IDE drives doesn't consume near as much as the CPUs, neither would a raid-0 chipset (or who cares about the chipset, I could live with a software stripeset as long as it's on 2 distinct channels), and besides, if it would require more cells on the battery, so be it. They make batteries last for 3 hours on inspiron 2500 laptop (8 cell battery option), of course for number crunching and all it wouldn't last as much, but the point is, I'd take the floppy space and cramp in another 40GB ide drive in there, 2 channels, double the space, double the speed and tripple the fun
Right now you can get a gig of ram in your laptop, you can get firewire, you can get wireless connectivity, CD-Writers, dvd players, you name it, the IDE raid feature is the only thing missing. Since the 2.5" drives aren't as big as their 3.5" cousins, it could be a good tradeoff, and I'd gladly take the performance too.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'm typing on that machines older brother in a way. Dell Inspiron 8100. I have the Mobile PIII chip. 1.13Ghz. 512 MB ram. 32 MB GeForce2 Go. 15" 1400x1050 screen.
Now granted there is no way my machine can compete with a decked out desktop system. However, in terms of the-best-of-both-worlds this maching can't be beat. I've got a killer mobile system, and a pretty hot gaming machine. Machine-wise, I'm pretty near the top when I go LAN partying. It's nice being able to show up with your equipment in one hand and jsut opening the screen and be ready to go.
Some down sides I've noticed with my machine so far as follows. One, when you hook up an external mouse something keeps you from making rapid movements get through the system. You can only move the mouse at a relatively slow pace or it will skip on the screen. Two, battery life stinks. Don't plan on playing games without being hardwired to the electrical grid. Even with dual batteries in my system. 3.5 hours is all it will do. On the plus side. If you step down the processor speed and do normal work. Like work on a spreadsheet I can get roughly 6 hours of work time. Not to shabby. Three, the plastic case is kind cheap and the chassis has a lot of flex. ie. don't pick it up by the corner.
Any bad stuff is pretty much nullified by the fact that this machine is pretty much a one of a kind. Mobile desktop to a new level.
Since I have one of these systems I can comment on the displays. In all honesty I've never had a problem with slow refresh rates. They are fast enough that you don't see any fuzzy images or washed out images. When people actually see a fps run on my machine they comment on just how clear and clean everything is. The displays are very crisp. No CRT can compare.
...when the 130nm Athlon XP chips come out. Hopefully that includes notebook chips, and maybe someone will finally have the cajones to build a decent Athlon notebook. I want brute force computation along with my GeForce 4, dammit!
The Dell laptops in question can take new video cards. For instance, I could upgrade my 8100 (GF2GO) to a GF4GO or an ATI card. The cards just aren't your average shape and size. Dell will sell them to you on thier supplies page.
Interesting you mention that. The worst offender (or most easily identifiable Slashdot cohort) is O'Reilly. A lisam@oreilly.com is the main outlet for these stories.
I have been pwned because my
A buddy of mine has one of those Dell Inspiron 8100s with the GeForce2Go. The light weight and 60 second setup really caught my eye. I gave it a whirl, but the blurring motion and artifacting problems (yeah, driver was updated) made the experience disappointing; especially a big fat block right on the crosshairs that made sniping all but impossible. Before long, the novelty wore off and I was back on my own box.
I haven't given the GeForce4Go-based notebooks a whirl yet and they're pricey.
My solution is to opt for a nice 17" LCD and get one of Shuttle's new SS40 series boxes when the AGP version comes out. Stick in a GeForce4 Ti4600 and you've got a small gaming system that won't blow your back out.
This'll have to do until we can get some whoop-ass wearables for a bit of augmented unreality. :)
G4s are wicked fast for MP3 encoding, due to AltiVec. My ancient G4 400 CD jukebox can rip at 10x without breaking a sweat, and it might even be disc-speed bound at that point.
And games can use a LOT of vector processing as well, if properly optimized. id software once said that the G4 was the fastest computer they had seen for 3D performance w/o hardware T&L or geometry (like the Rage 128 era).
Kernel compiles aren't helped much, although SIMD can do some fast string manipulation stuff as well.
My video compression blog
Really? I have the Dell 8100 with what I assumed was the same 15" screen, and playing platform games on it makes me physically ill -- really! --after half an hour or so. I haven't set up any FPS games yet.
waiting for better support of suspending
Lots of people have gotten the 8100 to work with a suspend-to-disk (s2d) partition. I got it to suspend with the kernel software suspend feature, but only if X wasn't running (nvidia's drivers aren't APM compliant).
The GeForce 4 440 that most of these high-end P4 notebooks sport has full MPEG-2 decoding built-in. So, outside of drawing to the screen, every function is done by a processor purpose built for DVD playback. While it's a good example of a feature laptop users are looking for, it's a terrible way to "demonstrate" the power of speedstep, as the P4 itself has very little to do with the battery life increase. They go on and on about the GF4's PowerMizer technology and the P4's Speedstep, and fail to realize that this battery life increase is likely due to having a dedicated decoding processor.
While they're at it, I might suggest the following purpose-built vs. software-simulated tests:
Pentium 4 running Quake 2 in software mode vs. Pentium 4 running Quake 2 with hardware acceleration: Which is faster?
$20 TI-30 solar calculator vs. $1,500 PC running calculator.exe under WindowsXP: Which is cheaper for basic mathematical functions?
MPEG-2 Encoder card vs. 1 Ghz Athlon: Which encodes quicker?
Incidentally, I noticed that they ran most of their framerate tests at 1024x768 (considered by most gamers, obviously, to be the optimal trade-off between quality and performance). Of course, this notebook (and most like it) has a native resolution of 1600x1200, and every 1600x1200 notebook I've ever seen has a terrible blurriness to it at anything other than the native resolution (obviously). I wonder how Quake 3 fares at a non-blurry resolution?
[GBA has platform games, and] So does a PC [link to Boycott Advance, a GBA emulator].
Yes, but you still have to buy the cartridge reader for $45 from a Visoly dealer such as Lik Sang. A GBA doesn't cost much more than that. And even then, VisualBoyAdvance is a bit more accurate than Boycott Advance (for GBA) and Marat's VGB (for GB/GBC).
[links to Super NES, Genesis, N64, and Game Boy emulators]
For one thing: Do NOT use iNES or NESticle. They have a bug in their VBlank handling that causes some games to skip their delay loops or perform other weird actions.
For another thing, cart readers for Super NES, Sega Genesis, and N64 were extremely hard to come by last time I checked.
[PlayStation emulator]
It's easy to read most PSX games (they're ISO 9660 file systems for Christ's sake), but many PSX games do not work well with a keyboard. If you're going to carry a USB PSX pad (Gravis GamePad Pro) with your laptop, why not just carry a GBA?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I recently bought the laptop the article is about, if anyone is interested, here are my current thoughts:
1.) XP sucks. yea well I know thats obvious but it was pretty damn strange to see my laptop struggeling with a 100mbit/s network connection to keep writing the data to the disk. my 1.6ghz 256mb RAM was at 50% usage as an ftp client while the server barely made the 10% mark.
2.) to get debian on it is pretty damned hard but it looks like everything is working apart from hte modem. Infrared, USB, PCMCIA (hot swapable), network, Graphics, twinview, DVD/CD-RW, etc.
graphics are sweet, unreal isnt stressing the thing to much even at full resolution etc.
3.)its a desktop replacement, make no mistake about it. you can knock a bull unconscious with it. its big but its good.
4.) dell service...nahhh, first wrong keybord then an unordered french one, then the right one, finally and you have to call up dell to build it in.
speedstep isnt supported under debian AFAIK but I am pretty sure the speedstep equivalent of the NV card is.
its a good laptop if you dont need to carry it around a lot. dell isnt exactly customer caring but at least the quality of the thing is good.
I here people on the concern over the plastic case. I haven't actually cracked mine though. I don't think mine will either. If I pick up my 8100 by the corner you can see the chassis flex. This is probably what contributes to the crack. It is probably hard to design a really beefy chassis around a 9lb notebook. Not to mention how much stuff is in it.
I can't comment on Dells product support. Only because my system has worked nearly flawlessly. I did have an issue with one of my options, an Actiontech 10/100 +56k setup. The card refuses to run 100 mbps. I wan't concerned because I replaced it with an internal 802.11b device. No external ants.
Great machine and I will be getting another.
Oh yeah, it runs Linux too. The only thing that need messing around with is the Nvidia driver. Works awesome.
::Drools::
::Wipes chin::
::drools more::
I was just looking at this the other day...pity with the config I wanted it would cost more than 2 desktops for me...almost $3000.
Still...::drools even more::
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Bzzzzt! I've got a Dual 1ghz G4 and iTunes only encodes at 8x. I might have a switch wrong someplace, but that's it. Photoshop is a blazing bastard though. Anyway, I just did an online, paid survey that was mostly asking me if I was interested in a workstation class laptop. I pretty much said no. When I'm talking workstation class machine, I mean Raid controller, dual cpu, 4gb of ram, gigantic 3d controller with 1 or 2 gb of texture memory and multiple GPU's. A laptop sure isn't going there. As a low-end gaming machine, sure, but certainly not a workstation.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
It's 15.
You can hardly call it a subwoofer. It sounds good for a laptop.. but I'd rather they just made the damn thing smaller and left it out.
ANd it's not a far cry at all from a 1.6Ghz P4 w/Gf4.
The Geforce4 440go is only marginally better than the gf2mx. It has some new features.. but overall, playin gquake and such, it's similar.
ANd 1.6Ghz -vs- 1.2Ghz is a marginal improvement.
Heh. Yeah. But you have to lug your whole system around and look like a nerd.
Wheras I can just open my briefcase and play some quake.
Why? if you are making a purchase decision, it's doubtful you would choose between the two based on this.
Either you want a laptop, or not.
A desktop is still more powerful for the same money, that is not in question.
actually, you can get the UXGA screen, you just have to customize your order.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!