Great read for all you gaming notebook lovers!

My two favourite websites are here and trustedreviews (oh actually 3 places the 3rd being skysports come on you arsenal!)

Jus stumbled across a good article with regards to gaming on notebooks here

Enjoy people and share your thoughts on it.what do you think?



Sunny

 

I appreciated that it was a very thorough piece, but I felt it was a bit misguided and backwards.

First, it doesn't really take into account the overhead Windows Vista has on performance. The mainstream unit with the Go 7600 likely would've performed substantially better under XP, with XP drivers. Gamers aren't using Vista right now: they're using XP.

Second, they take too much of a tack on trying to duplicate the desktop gaming experience, as though instead of there being trade-offs the notebook should just be directly superior due to its mobility, but this isn't the case.

Gaming on a notebook is an entirely different experience that needs to be taken on its own terms; compared to a desktop it will always come up hopelessly inferior, because the desktop offers one thing a notebook can't: the ability to customize space and experience. I can upgrade my monitor, I can upgrade my sound system (just did actually), I can customize my keyboard and mouse. While you can do all of these things with a notebook, at what point do you just say "screw it" and make a desktop?

 

I game and I use Vista. Got a T60 with a X1400, 1GB ram and it has great Vista support. I get better framerates under Vista then XP. I think it is just Nvidia that has problems with Vista drivers. And what do you mean by Vista overhead? The Aero stuff? Vista turns that off when you game. Also I use an USB stick with readyboost and i noticed that new maps load faster and pretty much all loading is speeded up compare to XP or Vista without the stick.

I have to agree with the rest. Desktop will always be faster but I hate desktops and I never want one again. When I am in play I hardly ever notice that I had to turn the settings down. I do notice when the framerates drop and that sucks. I wish they could make game settings dynamic that if the framerates drop below 20 it stops using shadows for a while till the framerate is better again. Then i could enjoy the better graphics during the time when i am not in the middle of a graphic intensive fire fight.

 

well prior to the 8800 series i think that notebook graphics cards were standing on its feet pretty well when compared against desktops....i mean yeah there were inferior...but still was handling its own against desktops...your right... but i think the whole point of the article is to show how laptops do have that ability that desktop lovers feel they dont...and that wen comsidering buying something for gaming that notebooks shouldnt be brushed aside...

 

i really have no problem with either. the only reason i prefer a desktop is for the reasons pulp said. you can do much more to a desktop than a notebook, ie customize cooling system, colored fans, hard drive coolers, switch cases and have much more upgrade capabilities.
and another thing to look at is heat. heat is one of the main factors limiting notebook gpus. take the MR X1900 for example. it has been significantly underclocked compared to its desktop counterpart for that main reason, well and battery life. but i do like the fact that i can just pick up my lappy and mouse and go anywhere with it.

 

Yeah, they should touch on the complaints about gaming on Vista. Or they should be aware of the issues as pro's and said something about it

I'm happy a mainstream-ish resource recognises you can game on a laptop for <£1K. I am getting sick of typing "you do not need to spend thousands to game on a laptop" on a UK forum I frequent

 

I think the guide was pretty good but it focused on the 2 configurations: I feel it should have an overview of how other cards like the go7400 and x1400 perform.

 

Hmmm interesting read for all gamers, Vista or no.

 

That CoH performance was a bit pathetic. My X1400 ran at those same settings @ > 30fps. Something must have been up with the Pegasus.

 

I want that XG-Station. I'm on a GMA 950. That would be really useful, just swap the graphics card i have in my desktop. Any idea what the price of it will be?

 

It's interesting that you mentioned that because that is both right and wrong.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35193

From reports, Aero is activated all the time regardless of whether you play a game or not. At the same time, there doesn't seem to be any performance benefit with disabling Aero, so it really doesn't matter.

As others have mentioned, when I think about notebook gaming, I think of it differently than desktop gaming, because I am aware of the differences in design requirements for the two different platforms. So I'm not really looking at absolute gaming performance rather than a decent mobile gaming experience. Perhaps, it's just setting my expectation lower (and if I were to buy a desktop I probably wouldn't by buying high-end GeForce 8800s or Radeon X1950XTXs anyways), but I'm generally satisfied with the performance I get from my MacBook Pro.