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Mobile vs. Desktop Gaming
Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has just posted an article investigating Mobile vs. Desktop gaming in their latest article entitled "New Age Computer Gaming - Mobile vs. Desktop Investigation". The article compares a Dell Inspiron 8200 with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics to a standard desktop system with nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics. Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!"
Why a Dell Inspiron? Wouldnt they be better off with something more targeted towards gamers, such as the Alienware 51m Laptop?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
That's certainly an issue at the moment - as is the deficiencies of LCDs in comparison to CRTs. Not just in size, but smoothness of the display and the ability to change resolutions/refresh rates if that becomes an issue in future games, or simply suits you better as a gamer.
However, getting a laptop to work stunningly as a gaming machine requires several things to improve - graphics cards, displays, battery life... perhaps even keyboard quality/changes depending on the game. Nothing like that will happen all at once, hopefully this is just one step closer.
Well, the latest PB G4 has 64MB DDR Radeon 9000 (on the 1GHz model)
http://www.apple.com/powerbook/specs.html
Well get a decent pair of headphones like the Sony V700s and you should be fine on any 15inch because your face is typically much closer to the display. There are other issues with LCD displays if you're really that hardcore.
i recently bought myself a Dell Inspiron 8200. The Inspiron made it because i wanted to have a notebook to play contemporary games with. For Online-Battles against my friends i didn't want to carry my PC even though it's only a Minitower. Surely it won't be the perfect hardware for Doom III, but HalfLife, Civ3, Anno1503 or Mafia all work fine. I'm completely satisfied.
Yours, Martin
Why buy the AlienWare laptop when you can have the exactly same laptop for much much lower price??
It's even assembled at the same factory!
Testimony of a Sony Vaio user.
I got myself a Vaio gr314mp nearly a year ago. It comes with a 1200MhZ p3 and the 16meg version of the mobility radeon 7500 and runs a lot of games fine. Multiplayer Quake 3 and Medal of Honour in 1024x768 run at a perfectly playable 30-odd fps (with some smoke effects and alpha-blending off... the card OpenGL drivers need careful tweaking to get good performance.)
My main reason for going laptop was I am on the road a lot, so a desktop isn't feasible for me. I have to say, I'm very chuffed with the results.
I love being able to lie in bed and play computer games. I spent about 2 months playing neverwinter nights on the train into work, and that made the time fly. I've even once or twice played mohaa over wireless while cooking dinner. This shit is great.
But... I don't ever expect to be playing doom 3 on this baby. The big thing is always the graphics card (lower processor speed and ram tend to be acceptable a lot longer), and I don't think I'll be wanting another laptop for games once this one loses its edge, unless I know I can plug in an external graphics card. A year of gaming for about $800 of depreciation isn't quite good enough.
Can anyone tell me why external pci-cards haven't caught on yet? Bus bandwidth wouldn't seem to be an issue if the architecture was right...
As soon as this becomes the norm, or I can swap in a new card when I want to, I will be happy to play on a laptop and pay slightly over the odds for improving game performance. But as it is, the computer I have now will soon be utterly useless in the face of new games.
The mobile gaming idea is superb, and the reality of it is great. Throw longevity in the mix and I'll never go back.
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I too experience fine gaming performance on my laptop -- well enough performance to frequently put me at the top ranks of scorers each game in SOF II.
I played Max Payne on it until I got bored...
Medal of Honor was excellent too...
There are several others I have played on this not too old laptop and they all run fine.
I agree though about laptops vs desktops and the angst about committing full time to a laptop. It was hard but the office bought this one!
My name is Sgt Rocky and I have a Powerbook. I play games on my laptop over WiFi in bed.
Yeah, but though I'm an Apple user, Apples are still not a great solution for gamers. This kind of thing in the laptop is probably more for the 3-D development end that Apple likes (Maya, for instance). Getting game companies to develop for Apple can only help Apple, though, so a top-of-the-line mobile graphics chip is doubly important.
As a Powerbook (g4) owner, though, I have to agree with the person who said that the LCD is a larger issue than the chip. LCDs (at least on laptops) are not optimal for gaming, yet.
This now concludes our broadcast day.
In areas where obtaining top performance is critical, the desktop will always win. This is one of those cases. The designers of laptops almost always need to make concessions, reducing performance, flexibility or other features of the laptop in order to meet the key design goals:
small size
low power consumption
When your goal is to maximize performance, you are not going to give size and power consumption any consideration. The same exact idea applies to wireless networking. Because of FCC limitations and other factors, it will probably always lag behind wired networking.
A laptop is probably adequate for gaming, but many gamers are out for total frames-per-second. And this at any cost...
today's high end mobile systems (or not so high-end) pump up 90 W, or at least this inspiron does .
#include "coucou.h"
This is a goatse.cx redirect, with a url long enough you have to copy/paste to notice it.
second of all, it's not even right.
ATI has focused on keeping power consumption low, to reduce the problem with heat dissipation. True, Nvidia is throwing out blast furnace cards that Require an air-intake... but ATI is managing to keep ahead of nvidia, while still sticking to low form factor heatsinkfans instead of 5 lbs monster copper heatsinks that could easily snap the AGP port right off the motherboard, if transported installed.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I have a friend that bought a laptop like 9 months ago to use for LAN parties. It's like a 1.6, with a GF2 Go, pretty decent size hard drive, and 256mb of ram. At the time the machine was fine, but already the machine is going to be on the lower end of the performance spectrum. The major problem with laptops as gaming rigs is that there is no upgrading the video processor! Had my friend bought a pc, not only would it have been cheaper, but with the money he saved he could have upgraded the video card two or three times! The proprietary design of laptops is what keeps them out of any sensible gamer's top pick for gaming devices. Wouldn't you agree?
The past is just the present only older -me-