More Revolutionary: Mobility Radeon 9600 or GeForce Go 6800?

I'm writing a paper for a college course on the evolution of gaming on notebooks, and it occurred to me that while I trot out the Mobility Radeon 9600 as the de facto turning point for notebook gaming, the GeForce Go 6800 was the first high-powered notebook gaming part and the one that fully fleshed out the 17" portable gaming machine.

While I still think the Mobility Radeon 9600 was the more revolutionary of the two, fully legitimizing notebook gaming and the idea of producing gaming hardware for notebooks, I think the Go 6800 was also a very revolutionary part in and of itself.

So I put it to you: which do you think made a bigger impact on the industry, and why?

 

i just cant remember back that far and i didnt mess with either of those gpu's. not even the desktop versions of them. the first "real" video card i had was an x800xt and that was a phenomenal card. and i dont think u can compare the 9600 againts the 6800 cause they are in totally different generations.

 

What's more revolutionary - Star Wars: A New Hope, or Star Wars: The Phantom Menace?

Have to go with the original.

 

Can't you just say that both have had huge impacts on the industry, but in different areas? The 9600 was the first card that made Laptop Gaming an acceptable experience for users. However, the 6800 gave that experience a huge boost by allowing gamers to have a desktop like gaming experience (17" screen, high rez, all settings maxed etc.).
You can compare it to say, the invention of the Computer and the invention of the silicon chip. Computers made things possible, but the silicon chip gave us an incredible boost.

Edit: OMG!!! 666 posts with 6 rep power! I'm the devil reincarnated!!

 

Well, I think the MR 9600 would be more important, since you could have the best, fastest GPU, but it wouldn't change the industry if it only reached a small segment of the market. The MR 9600 had good heat and power characteristics which allowed it to fit into a wider range of form factors and it was a mid-ranged part for lower price and higher volumes. While people with high-end GPUs may be a game developers ideal or target customer, mid-range GPUs and their users who are likely more casual gamers are where the bulk of the money is made.

It's interesting because along the same vein both the Mobility Radeon/GeForce2 Go and the Mobility Radeon 9000 where very strong motivators for making laptops legitimate gaming platforms. I think the Mobility Radeon 9000 in particular was a big mover since when it was launched all it had competing against it was the GeForce2 Go, which put it at a huge advantage. It further differentiated itself by providing full DX8.1 support even when nVidia launched their new GeForce4 Go. Compared to the desktop Radeon 9000, the Mobility version was clocked the same and was equally powerful and the Mobility Radeon 9000 was launched a few months before the Radeon 9700 and the R300 core which meant at that time it wasn't that outclassed by desktop parts. I think this was definitely the time when ATI lead the mobile market since the Mobility Radeon 9600, when it was launched, pushed strong laptop gaming performance into the masses (the mass that had "reasonable" performance") while the Mobility Radeon 9000/9200 brought the bottom up, improving the limiting case (ie. lowest performance), and building a stronger foundation for game developers to move forward.

 

Back in the day I suppose the 9600 was the hands down winner.

 

I still remember the craze over those Radeon 9X00s.

 

Especially over the Radeon 9700 cards. They still perform rather well today on my friend's desktop.

 

I would have to say the 9600 - it showed that true dedicated rather then just passing gaming was possible on a notebook and the 6800, I think, was just a further development on that really....

 

9600 for sure.

 

Call me nuts but I think that the Radeon mobility 7500 was the most revolutionary.

I had one (64mb) in my former 4 1/2 year old Gateway 600xl (1.6ghz P4, 700some RAM) and I could play Half-Life 2 on med low settings (model and texture detail on med, everything else on low) at 1280x1024 resolution at a very good FPS (usually stayed around 30, but took a serious hit for a few of the scripted sequences).

I was really surprised at how well it ran. A four year old laptop running HL2 smoothly! Even with the settings turned down the game looked better than most xbox1 games.

 

That's not really incredible. HL2 was released in 2004. If your laptop is 4 years old, it's be from 2003. That's like playing Company of Heroes on a Geforce 6800. My 2003 AMD Athlon 64 2.2 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 4 MX could handle HL2.

 

The Source engine is probably one of the most optimized and efficient engines out there, which is why it seems to be able to get great performance and great visuals from almost every hardware level. Although, in the case of the GeForce4 MX and Mobility Radeon 7500, they are running in DX7 mode compared to more modern GPUs which may have the same frame rates but are running more complex code.

In terms of the Mobility Radeon 7500, I didn't find it that revolutionary due to the timing, because it came after the GeForce2 Go and original Mobility Radeon. The latter two may be considered more important since they kept mobile performance and hardware support in lock-step with the desktop GPUs. By the time the Mobility Radeon 7500 was launched, the GeForce3 and Radeon 8500 were already launched, so in comparison the MR 7500 wasn't that impressive. Also, the GeForce4 Go offered the same DX7 hardware level, but I'm pretty sure they performed better.

Instead of the MR 7500, I think the MR 9000 based on the Radeon 8500 was more revolutionary. When the MR 9000 was released, the only competition it had was the GeForce2 Go and I'm pretty sure the MR 9000 was stronger even in DX7 code. Even later, when the GeForce4 Go was released, the MR 9000 had the advantage of DX8.1 support even though the GeForce4 Go may have been faster in DX7 code. The MR 9000 was also pretty impressive because it brought DX8.1 support to the low-end mobile, at a time when on desktop nVidia was still restricting it to the middle/high-end with the GeForce4 Ti. The MR 9000 was also launched before the Radeon 9700 so DX9 hadn't arrived yet and the MR 9000 brought mobile to feature parity with desktop.