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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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
:)
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."
good article about just that topic at toms hardware.
:P
Basically the new LCD monitors coming out this summer and towards the end of year are getting very close to whats required for high quality gaming. any monitor with a response time of 20 ms or less will yield at least 50 images per second displayed, and there are quite a few nice ones that you will be able to choose from with thoose kind of times very soon.
just be prepared to whip out close to 2 grand for one
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
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.
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