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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!"
The biggest problem of mobile gaming is there is mainly one game in town, the radeon 9000. The gf4go is not bad but its not the best either. Mobile has caught up enough but its going to take a while for people to think of laptops as gaming machines.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Of course power is going to be the signigicant factor in mobile gaming. With the newest generation of video cards pushing the limits of even 300 watt power supplies, there's no way the meager 30 to 40 watts of today's high end mobile systems could be ample to power anything even remotely competitive.
But only one problem battery. Yea unless we have long battery lives this wont really do. Most laptop owners will use it for gaming when they have spare battery life. So if we have 20 hour battery backup, which dosent burn you then maybe yes!
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fix ghosting on LCD's and I'll ditch my CRT. Make the labtop keyboard bigger, and I'll ditch my keyboard+CPU....wait....then all I have is a small form factor desktop w/ a built in monitor...hmmmmm
hmm.. most of the laptop sales are directed towards business users. I doubt a laptop geared for gaming will sell that much. So in a way the test is good. Take a mainstream laptop, the kind most people will buy and then see wether it performs. Moreover many people get laptops on a temporary basis from the place they work, now a company will by the latest dell, but wont buy a laptop for gaming, right?
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do laptop's always seem to be "on the brink" of desktop performance? Do sites just repeat this news item everytime a more powerful laptops come out? The Geforce2go was a major step; this is a normal business cycle advance. The performance of laptops is never anywhere near the performance level of a similarly priced desktop, and that has been static for 15 years, yet over and over again we get reports about how laptops are becoming more and more like desktops... please.
When I am on the road there is no space to pull out my little baby optical mouse and a hard surface to use it on. Tried playing Medal of Honor with the trackpad? Entertaining to say the least.
The keyboard as well leaves a lot to be desired. My Compaq Evo N160 (P3 1.2GHz, 512MB, Radeon Mobility M7) has rediculously sized and placed Ctrl keys. How the hell am I meant to crouch! The test bed for this article however uses a Dell, and I notice that their keyboards are normal in their key placement.
For this reason, gaming is not quite as good as a desktop. Even if the hardware is, (my laptop was quite quicker than my desktop up until recently) the interface is not up to scratch. This sort of includes the LCD monitor, too.
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Not true! (oh, and these are my opinions)
;)
My IBM A31 (P4/1600,512DDR,ATI7500/32,15") plays the games I want to play very well!
I get higher framerates in Counterstrike than most of the desktops in my workplace (these are recent Dell boxes), it runs UT2003 VERY well, Q3, AND it allows me to do all the OGL and DX8 development I need to do (ok, without shaders).
I've never been able to play games on a 19" or 21" screen, always preferring 17", so ok maybe 15" inch is slightly smaller than MY optimal, but the portablility more than makes up for that.
Yes, they can get stolen, but so can your desktop! Insurance is a smart thing, some can pay you for loss of data and all sorts of problems.
I agree they're too expensive, but they're also a good tax write-off, the extra cost is worth the portability. I can't take my desktop to my favourite cafe and set it up on the little table now, can I? I am actually most productive in public, something to do with forced concentration. (I am also almost non-productive at my workplace, and fairly productive at home, hehe.)
Don't knock a good laptop. Gee, I was baited, well done!
NetNewsWire into Yojimbo!
Why compare a laptop with a Radeon 9000 to a Desktop with a Radeon 9000 when you can compare it to something totally different and draw your conlusion about laptop gaming from that!
If you're looking at the performance of laptops for gaming, you make your desktop as similar as possible.. same RAM, same CPU speed, SAME VIDEO CARD. Otherwise, it's not truely useful stats.
Too bad they couldn't have tested this one too...
Bringing mobile gaming to new heights
nVidia GPU Delivers Fastest Mobile 3D Performance
Nvidia to launch NV28M at Comdex - The first known notebook design is slated for Q1 next year, from long time Nvidia partner Dell
The only comparison test I want to see is a true bang for the buck test. Let the testers build the best system they can for say $2000 and let them go at it. This is the only comparison that makes sense, as anyone going for ultimate performance will no doubt be building a desktop anyway. Whatever, the article is poorly written anyway.
The story, in a few words: we compare two different computers and find that they both run games.
Woo-hoo. What, were they expecting the laptop hardware to be magically unable to run games or something?
What might have been useful would be to time how long the Inspiron lasts running games off a battery, just for interest's sake. I'm an occasional laptop gamer myself (Inspiron 4100, though), and my battery life drops from 4 hours (per battery - I have two) to about 1.5 hours, when playing games.
- Alienware: Nice rig, about $2853.00
- Power Notebooks: Same damn thing, $2110.00. You can double the RAM to 1GB, add another 20GB to the HD, and it is still 300 less than the alienware jive.
Thanks for the Power Notebooks link, I had never seen been there and it almost time for a new laptop.If in doubt, visit sometime one of those gaming forums sites, like EsReallity.com. Discussions of input devices do appear there more then often.
Not to mention the fact that I yet have to see at least one gamer (pro prefferably) which uses LCD (or similar technology) monitor. :)
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Just for the information of the ones that like to flame on people who claim to need 80 fps or more.
FPS isn't the same all the time! When you test FPS in a quick singleplayer it can be as high as 60 and still break in to a useless 10 when you're in a hot pursuit of 3 enemys along with 4 teammates, with everyone firing at maxrate. A max of roundabouts 80FPS minimum is needed if you don't want to notice a performance break when everyone meets for the big showdown in the center of a map. FPS break-in is noticed once it goes below 20 and that will allways happen eventually on a laptop.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why a Dell Inspiron?
The reason is simple: Dell has paid TweakTown to advertise on their site. TweakTown needs a boost in traffic to justify to Dell the ad spend so they can say 'See, Mr. Dell, we have lots of unique visitors so its a good idea to continue to advertise with us.' Thats why you should NOT click thru the link and help artificially boost his traffic numbers.
There is a kick-back going to 'Mr.Tweak' for every Dell sold thru the TweakTown site:
click this link, and you'll be supporting TweakTown! .
How much 'investigating Mobile vs. Desktop' do you honestly think went on?
This is the worst kind of whoring (karma-whoring or otherwise) I've ever seen here. And no this is not a troll - its very much a commentary on the problem of having self-proclaimed experts publish their supposedly objective 'investigations' and 'reviews' without clearly stating their obvious conflict of interest from the start.
As many have pointed out below this really isnt an issue. Mobile hardware specs are always going to lag behind desktops and game developers have a tendency to create their best games for the high end (e.g. Unreal Tournament 2003), which means that laptops won't always be able to run the latest games. I'm surprised MrTweak/MrDellSalesman didnt call his Dell infomercial
'Dude! Youre getting a Dell!'
It's an Alpha, which means its full of buggy code and hasnt been optimized to the point where the final product will eventually perform. That also means that any benchmarks run using something as unstable, sloppy and chunky as an alpha are a false measure and therefore are completely unreliable.
The cool factor or street cred he thinks he might gain by using a leaked bit of unstable software as part of the testbed are completely worthless when trying to establish some reliable manner of measuring performance.
As Jericho pointed out, using the alpha demonstrates poor judgement, not only because it's technically unsound (or even for the legal risks), but just as a matter of common sense.