Graphics Cards selection for gaming

I use a macbook for my everyday computer, but I am looking to buy a cheapish laptop for gaming, Dragon age: Origins will probably be the most demanding (graphics wise) I will be playing as I'm more interested in retro games. When I first started playing this game I had to use low graphic settings as I was using a laptop totally not designed for gaming with the NVidia GeForce 8400M GS. (Also I may have a go on DA3 if any of the following will support it)



Right, now to the options:



- Intel® HD Graphics 4000 with 8gb (4gb + 4gb) RAM and Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor (2.30GHz, 3 MB cache)

- AMD Radeon HD 7500G Discrete-Class with 6gb RAM and AMD Dual-Core A6-4455M (2.1 GHz, 2.6 GHz with TurboBoost, 5 GT/s, 1 MB L2 cache memory)

- AMD Radeon HD 6480G Dual GPU, up to 2.98 GB with 6gb DDR3 and AMD Dual-Core A4-3300M (1.9 GHz, 6 MB L3 cache)

- NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 630M with 8gb RAM and 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor (3M Cache, 2.30 GHz)

- ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470, 512MB dedicated memory with 4gb RAM and Intel® Core™ i3-330M Processor- 2.13 GHz- 2.5 GT/s DMI- 3 MB Smart Cache

- ATI Radeon HD 4250 with 4gb RAM and Dual-core AMD Athlon™ II X2 P360 Processor- 2.3GHz- 1MB L2 Cache- 1.8 GHZ HT

- Nvidia® Geforce™ G310M with 4gb RAM and Intel® Core™ i5-430M Processor- 2.26 GHz- 2.5 GT/s DMI- 3MB Smart Cache

- ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5450 with 4gb RAM and AMD Phenom™ II X2 N620 Processor- 2.8 GHz- 1.8 GHz HT- 2 MB L2 Cache



I know none of these are amazing, but I'm looking for the one which will enable me to play on the highest graphics settings, whilst running at a decent FPS rate. I have searched the web for info on these but not a lot is given.



Thanks for any help.

 

- Intel® HD Graphics 4000 with 8gb (4gb + 4gb) RAM and Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor (2.30GHz, 3 MB cache)

This one sounds fishy. CPU name suggests a Sandy Bridge which should have HD 3000 graphics not 4000.

In any case, if you're playing games of yesteryear, how about getting a performance card from a few years ago? Those will still get better result then newer low-end cards, especially for older games..

 

Thanks Sponge, I've been looking but with not much luck, I've budgeted at a maximum of £400 for this laptop (as I spent so much on my macbook)

I've been focusing my searches on refurbished models so to get a good deal. Ideally it would be a laptop with a decent graphics card, processor and RAM (I'm not 100% sure but I presume these three are all factors into gaming on high video settings, but getting good performance too.) And with Windows 7 (I've heard very bad things about 8)

Any idea on where to begin my search? I've been looking on Currys and Laptops Direct so far.

Thanks.

 

For us brits, going to be hard to find any decent gaming performance. Preferably any laptop in your price range with a dedicated GPU would be best, this will be the most important factor for gaming.

HotUKDeals is a good website, around £450 and you get a i5 and nvidia GT630m which is ok for gaming.

£500 and you can get a GT650m which is pretty good for gaming. Really hard to get anything with a dedicated GPU for less. Maybe try dell outlet, but their cheaper deals arn't the best.

 

Hi Alex
sponge is correct.
HD3000 is sandy bridge Intel HD Graphics 3000 - Notebookcheck.net Tech
HD4000 is ivy bridge Intel HD Graphics 4000 - Notebookcheck.net Tech

for a comparison of the above graphics you posted check this list Comparison of Laptop Graphics Cards - Notebookcheck.net Tech

i know nothing about ati so out of your list above i would have to pick this one "NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 630M with 8gb RAM and 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor (3M Cache, 2.30 GHz)"

 

£400 is a very tight budget. You might get lucky on eBay but I can't think of any way sellers might stand to make money by selling gaming laptops at this price level. So.. keep camping on eBay or build one from barebones..

 

you could check out (dont laugh now) sainsburys supermarkets as they sell the medion/razer laptops and once a year come out with a very high spec lappy and lower all their price on other models. not the best make in the world but its a tight budget so not many directions we can go.

you could also post in the what should i buy thread as theres quite a few looking for lappys at round a bouts the 4-500 mark http://forum.notebookreview.com/what-notebook-should-i-buy/

 

What is your budget? Have you considered a Lenovo Y580? This is available with 1080p display, i7-3630QM, Nvidia 660m, and I've seen this model available for less than $1,000 on sale.

EDIT: Sorry, nvm I see your budget is £400.

In that case, you may want to buy a used or refurbished laptop. Look for anything with graphics card about equal to the 5830m (rank #47) or better on this ranking list. The 5830m is probably about the weakest card that can still play most games at 1080p.

 

£94 more:

Sony S13A1X9ES Core i7 3520M, Windows 7 Pro 64Bit, 1600 x 900 WXGA Display, NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE 2GB Graphics, 6 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD,

Sony VAIO SVE1511A1EB.CEK 15.5-inch Laptop (Black) - (Intel Pentium Dual Core 2.30GHz Processor, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Windows 7 Edition Home Premium): Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

 

The description is not even consistent.. What's up with i7-3520M one moment and Pentium Dual Core the next? In the UK this kind of prices for the former is hardly realistic..

 

I've found a laptop which I think looks pretty decent for my budget, you lot tell me if I'm wrong

Acer Aspire V3 series:
Intel i5-3210M processor 2.5GHz
6gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce GT 630M graphics

Thoughts?

 

A little skeptical you can get that for £400 but if you do, it's well worth the price. My seconday laptop in sig. cost about £400 and that was with integrated graphics.

 

Decided to go over my budget a little at £430, the majority of the models I found had an i3 processor, thought I'd pay that little extra for a better processor.

Just waiting for a reply e-mail confirming all the specs.

 

Just saw one on dell, its got a HD 7670M which is similar to the GT630. Refurbished though, but still its cheap.

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dfh&cs=ukdfh1&puid=c7e89ac5

 

Choose that one.

 

I'd go with the max you can get, the best you can afford. Dragon Age: Origins is no walk in the park. It's still a very demanding game and it still has massive memory leak issues, so having a dedicated GPU with good memory might help.
- Personally I think DA:O is easily the better looking game than DA2. DA2 was garbage.

 

Turns out that model had Intel HD, which I am staying well clear of!

Thanks guys, I've expanded my search now though to a budget of £450 and I'm looking at Windows 8 now.

I was just looking for Windows 7 as I read that 8 has a few compatibility problems with some games. So the search goes on.

Denni, that does look like a pretty good one but ideally i would like an i5 processor. But I've been looking mainly at refurbished as my requirements and budget don't really compliment each other very well!

Hula, I completely agree, DA2 was a complete travesty, I didn't like the non-customizable support characters, or the fact that the storyline seemed to be non existent, or when it was, terribly fragmented. I just want to be able to enjoy DAO in its full glory!

 

The Intel HD4000 is actually better than some low end discrete cards: AnandTech - Intel HD4000 Benchmarks

If you don't have an urgent need, you may want to hold off on your purchase for a while. Reportedly, the next generation of Intel integrated graphics, the Haswell GT3 will be able to run a number of games at 1920x1080 resolution.

Haswell GT3 running Skyrim at 1080p, High Setting

Haswell GT3 vs Nvidia 650m Dirt 3 at 1080p, 0xAA

 

This is very tempting, but I've been without games (bar the ROMs on my phone) for a fair while now, so I'm not sure I want to wait, plus with my budget I doubt whether I'd get a brand new laptop with a new to the market graphics card.

Also, I've been looking for dedicated graphics cards rather than the usual integrated Intel as keeps coming up on my search!

Any idea when the release would be for the Haswell GT3?

AND, finally, for gaming would windows 7 or 8 be recommended?

Thanks.

 

May-June most likely. If you could wait, wait. Its gonna be like 2x the performance of Sandy IGP plus the CPU is faster

 

I've found one but all it says in the tech specs under Graphics Card is 'dedicated' surely this doesn't mean it would be an integrated Intel with some dedicated memory, because then it would be a shared graphics card, wouldn't it? Because I'm sure there's no such thing as a dedicated Intel graphics card.

I have e-mailed the company asking what the brand and model number of this mystery 'dedicated' graphics card is, just waiting for a reply. (I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that it's an NVidia graphics card!)

Been and purchased a new laptop today, believe it all not, from Argos. £450 for Intel i5 Processor, 8gb RAM and a dedicated graphics card, looked at the box and it was not as advertised, it does not have a dedicated graphics card but an Intel HD 4000. Not too happy (thought it might be too good to be true!)

There was another I saw with an AMD A8 Quad Core processor, 8GB RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 7640G Graphics card for the same price. How does the AMD processor match up to the i5 and because the graphics card is the same brand as the processor does that mean it's likely to be integrated too? Also how does AMD stand up against the only two I've had experience with - ATI & NVidia?

Thanks.

 

Intel® Core™ i7-3632QM (2.2GHz, 6M cache)
8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory (2 DIMMs)
1 TB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
2 GB AMD Radeon HD 7730M Card

Got all this for £450. I don't think I'm going to find a better deal than that.

 

What are the specs on your macbook (pro)? They tend to be okay/good for gaming. Bootcamp might be the cheapest option giving the best performance. Or do you need a second laptop?

 

I wouldn't expect to be able to play games at 1080p with any machine for £400-500 which would be equivalent to a $600-$700 machine here. For 1080p you'll need a GPU with GDDR5 RAM, and a decent CPU, higher end i5. At 720p your options open up a bit, but I would look for at least a nVidia 640m (Kepler, not Fermi) or AMD 6770m/7750m and come up with the cash for it somehow otherwise you will have a miserable gaming experience.

Oops, I just noticed this after I posted, but great deal actually. Should manage newer games at medium detail, maybe even some high at 720p/768p.

To answer your question about the AMD the "G" (i.e. 7640G) cards are integrated graphics, although perform about on par with the lower end dedicated GPU's. I'm scoring about 1300-1350 3DMark11 with it and ~ 4700 3DMark Vantage with my A10-4600m with 7660G.

 

15-inch: 2.3GHz
with Retina display

2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
8GB 1600MHz memory
256GB flash storage1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
Built-in battery (7 hours)2

It would be good for gaming, but I did want to have a separate one to save clogging up my HDD.

I've ordered a laptop with the specs stated in my previous post, so fingers crossed I'll be alright with those!

I hope so!

 

Your mac will be a whole lot better to game on than any of those! Just buy a bigger hard drive or an external hard drive to install windows on then. Why buy a whole lot worse laptop when you have a better one? That's a waste of money imo. The 650m will run almost all games on high in 1080p. Much better thany of those you listed earlyer.

Edit: an external hard drive wil save you 400£ and you'll have a much better laptop to game on. Why would you waste that money

 

I'm with pranktank - just use your rMBP with win7 in bootcamp. You won't be able to run most games at 2880x1800 native res, but it will handle 1920x1080 just fine.

If you run out of HDD space, buy a bigger internal drive or delete a bunch of stuff you don't need. I have a pretty small primary drive (dual 160GB Intel SSDs), but over time I became accustomed to deleting most of my steam games and downloading them again next time I want to play.

I use SDXC cards for storing music and videos. They go up to 128GB, and if you buy a Class 10 card the read/write speed is pretty fast. Or you might want to buy a thunderbolt drive.

 

You can also just buy an external harddrive to boot from if you really really want no windows files on your mac ssd. It will cost you maybe 50-100 pounds for a big enough hard-drive and 50-100 pounds for a copy of windows (if you don't have one laying around).

That way you'll spend around 150 pounds, you'll have a much better gaming laptop than when you spent £450 and you'll have £300 left to buy games or a bigger ssd and you can still have money left.

So you have to choose between:
-a gaming laptop that is not really capable of decent gaming. Damage: £450
-a (very) good gaming laptop (that is also beautiful and mobile, a lot more mobile than two laptops). Damage: £50-200

I really hope you can still cancel your order.

 

While the rest have a point, that £450 laptop that alex bought is very likely to be the top-spec Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition. That one starts at £689 brand new (before whatever discounts you can manage) so selling it on ebay would make a nice little profit, given proper advertising etc..

But of course cancelling the order is probably the most hassle-free option.

 

I do have a 3TB time capsule, So If I can create a partition on that then I will use that method, otherwise I'll stick with this laptop, as I keep everything on the time capsule, there are barely any personal docs etc on the internal HDD.

 

You can install the games themselves and run them from an external drive, but not Windows itself. Macs can't install or boot Windows on anything but the internal SSD.

 

In order to benefit from reduced loading times, etc., it's also best to install any games directly on your primary SSD.

 

Installing only a small fraction of the games I own among Steam, Origin, and physical media takes up nearly 200 GB of hard drive space in Windows. That doesn't even count the games, music, and movies that I keep on the OS X side. The OP's MBP has a 256 GB SSD that must be partitioned between OS X and Windows. He can set a 64 GB partition for Windows then install and run games off an external Thunderbolt hard drive or SSD. Transfer rates are not much different on a Thunderbolt drive than they would be with an internal drive, being more consistent than USB 3.0.

 

I'd say you probably want to set up the partition a little larger than 64GB for Windows and your games. Unless you are doing video editing in Final Cut, or something in OSX that requires a lot of space on your SSD, you may want to dedicate more space for bootcamp than OSX.

In my case, I have a few hundred Steam games but I only keep 2 or 3 of them permanently installed, just the ones that have lots of mods or that I play frequently. The rest I delete and then if I want to play them again I just download again from Steam (or from Origin, Amazon, etc.) Apart from Adobe CS5 Master Collection which takes up about 6GB, plus another 10GB or so for work project files, I don't have many applications requiring a lot of space, games definitely take up more space than anything else.

If your internet connection is slow, downloading can be a problem, so another solution might be to use Steam client backup to backup games you have downloaded to any an external USB, then transfer them back to your primary drive whenever you want to play again. And the Class 10 SDXC cards are great, much more convenient than lugging around a USB drive.

 

I was not aware of that. Thanks. Then I think he should definitely invest in a bigger internal ssd instead of buying an underpowered laptop to game on.

 

You have two options for expanding a Retina MacBook Pro's internal storage: 1) Buy a direct fit replacement from Other World Computing (they are the only company providing new replacements). or 2) Buy a used original equipment SSD from the likes of eBay.

 

It is that laptop. Fairly bulky by the looks of it, but I'm not complaining.

I don't tend to carry around my macbook, call me a worrier, but in London, you never know.

This is slightly frustrating, at the time, not sure about now but it worked out cheaper to buy a 3TB time capsule than to even double the HDD to 512GB, not just that, I have always felt more secure storing everything on an external.

I'm not sure how I feel about using bootcamp or the like on my macbook, hence my original plan of getting a separate laptop.

I want to say sod it and fork out for an Alienware or something!


Guys, thanks for all the help, it has been extremely helpful, but for now I'm going to stick to this laptop I've ordered. (The funny thing is, I'm going through a phase of playing text based RPGs!) I'm sure you'll here from me again when I do want to put Windows onto may macbook, after craving better gameplay!

 

There are also quite a few games on Steam that are compatible for OSX.

http://store.steampowered.com/browse/mac/

 

Except in very few instances, those ports are not very well done. Even Valve's own games (Half-Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, etc) look and perform much more poorly on OS X than on Windows. In Portal 2, I can play on the Windows side at my MacBook's native resolution (1680x1050) with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x AF with vsync on and maintain a rock solid 60 fps. To get similar performance on OS X, I have to drop the resolution down to 1280x800 (for some reason, 1440x900 isn't accessible) and even then there's the occasional slowdown. The Steam client itself is also buggy as heck, plagued with high CPU usage and memory leaks that Valve has taken no interest in fixing.

Games I've bought from the App Store, such as Call of Duty 4 and Batman: Arkham Asylum are much more optimized. Much of that is down to the companies doing the ports (Aspyr and Feral Interactive), but as with any AAA game release, bringing it to the Mac takes time. Only very recently has Black Ops made it. I'm hoping for an eventual port of Black Ops 2, but considering how long it's taken for the first one, I'm not hopeful it will be any time soon.

The Mac has come a long, long way as a gaming platform. Since Apple decided to put "real" GPUs into its systems, gaming on a Mac has been a much more enjoyable experience. Shoddy Steam support has put a damper on that, though.

 

Didnt read the whole thread but i d suggest to sell your macbook and buy macbook pro (used or refurbished) and have one laptop to play some games and do work.

 

He has a macbook pro (retina)

 

Then I would suggest you do that next time or refrain from posting all together because the OP quite clearly stated what Mac he has.

 

Doh... that makes no sense to me then. Sorry.