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.

Comments

NOT good for car racing games.

[Nathdot]

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.

:)

Re:LCD Screens Suitable for Gaming?

[martissimo]

good article about just that topic at toms hardware.

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 :P

Insane acts of low-powered gaming

[benwaggoner]

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.