hmmm?

after constantly reading how it seems 99%
of all laptops with their pentium 4/athlon xp/64
and reasonable video cards cant or wont properly
play most games it makes me wonder some times how
the many years old xbox with its pentium 3 @700mhz
and old school geforce 3 can still play games that seem
to look and run just fine

 

Easy question.
It's not that they can't or won't play MOST games, it is that they won't play most NEW games well. The games made in the last 3 yaers since the Xbox came out have far better and more advanced graphics...especially in the last year. Also it's not the CPU that really matters, it's the GPU or graphics controller or card that determines how well games performs. When the Xbox came out it was very good for it's time for graphics performance and on par with the PC of that time. Now on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being better) and 10 being the best desktop gaming station available and a 1 being a playstation version 1, an Xbox would be 3 or 4; they are very poor graphics wise compared to the latest PC gaming rigs. If you think the Xbox graphics look and run just fine, then you have not seen what is out there for the top PC based gaming stations. Any new Xbox based games have been optimized for that platform(ie, advanced 3D graphics functions turned off or way toned down)

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

Hi,

bootleg2go is right about the Xbox - it's graphics are pretty ordinary compared to any recent PC. My Xbox certainly looks very old fashioned against my PC.

But the Xbox does have some advantages over PCs. Firstly, the game developers had only one set of specs to work with, whereas PCs can have a virtually infinite range of combinations of hardware, installed software, drivers, etc. It is MUCH easier to optimise a game for a single known situation than for zillions, many of which are unknown.

Secondly, the video in many laptops actually isn't all that "reasonable", it's usually mostly pretty low level stuff. Just because the name sounds familiar it doesn't mean that it's the same video device that you would find in a desktop machine. Most laptops don't have "cards" at all, in the sense that desktops do, but have a diminished version directly on the board.

A decent desktop card is a hulking slab of a thing covered in heat sinks, fans, capacitors, and all manner of bells and whistles. Because of constraints of space and heat generation the laptop equivalent (even if similarly named) is just a few components, and will not have the same performance.

For instance, have a look around the net for reviews of the Geforce 6800 cards. If you can find pic of one of the new PCI express versions for a laptop, you'll see that it actually is a removable card (a quite unusual, but welcome development). However, it's a very small and bare looking item compared to the Geforce 6800 monsters that go into desktops. And the chip says 6800 Go, not plain 6800. Salemen will no doubt tell everybody that it's a 6800 just like in the big machines, but don't expect identical performance, because it will not be there (although it will still be pretty good [ ] ).

Cheers, Chris