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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.
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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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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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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
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Nvidia to launch NV28M at Comdex - The first known notebook design is slated for Q1 next year, from long time Nvidia partner Dell
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.
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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.