Buying a new Lappy...Need Advice on Nvidia 770m or ATI 8970m among other things

So, my Gateway P-6860FX finally bit the dust last week... :cry: Loved that thing, many good years of gaming on that machine. I've always wanted a Sager, so I think now is the time. I've had so many Sagers in my Basket for checkout, I just need to order one already. Is there something monumental worth waiting for other than the constant progression of tech in the industry?

I'm interested in a 15" laptop, feels like the sweet spot for playing games, while still being portable. 17" looks the best, but was such a hassle lugging around.

This narrowed me down to the 8265, 8255 & 8235. I'm leaning towards the 8255, as I really dig backlit keyboards and like the look of the touchpad. Price wise, the 8235 seems to be the best price, but of course lacks the backlit keyboard.Any opinions on these 3 models?

Next up, if I go with the 8265 or 8255, do I go with an S version with the AMD 8970m or the Nvidia 770m? I've been an Nvidia user for many years now, but still have a warm spot for AMD. As it seems, Nvidia has superior drivers, but the 8970m seems to have the better horsepower. I'm leaning towards the 770m, but if AMD does well with their drivers, their card puts up a decent fight. Looking for some opinions on this. I've been out of the game for a while with laptops.

I'm going with an SSD for the OS install, and figure a 1 TB HDD 7200rpm for storage.

Give Windows 8.1 a shot? Heard there were some mouse glitches back in early November with Windows 8. Heard 8.1 gives us back the start button and desktop screen.

Thanks all.

 

I have an AMD currently, and I hope it wasn't the wrong decision because of all the things AMD's doing right now (hint hint mantle).

 

I'm really out of the loop....so i'll ask, what's the deal with Mantle? An API for devs or some sort? Is it working out?

 

A small quote from AMD's blog:

“It’s not that Mantle is the initial language with which developers are writing their games on each platform, as some have surmised; the point of Mantle is that it’s easy to reuse, in whole or in part, the development effort expended on the next-generation consoles when bringing the same game to life on the PC. This is because Mantle allows developers to use the same features and programming techniques they are already utilizing for next-gen game consoles. And while the initial iteration of Mantle is intended specifically for PCs, it has been designed from the beginning to be extensible to other platforms as well.”


Source here:

AMD Gaming: The Four Core Principles of AMDR... | AMD Blogs


Some more interesting stuff to read:

Tom's Hardware's AMA With AMD, In Its Entirety - Uninstalling Drivers, The Radeon HD 7750, And Kaveri At APU13

 

In my experience(AMD 7970m), you won't regret going AMD if you do. All new games run smoothly. As far as mantle is concerned, can anyone give us info regarding how well the 770m handles BF4? On my 7970m it runs at around 40-60 in multiplayer on Ultra settings. I'd like to see if mantle is giving us a big boost or not because we could be seeing quite a few multiplat games using this in the near future.

EDIT: Ok I just looked at notebookcheck.net for benchmarks of the cards. The 7970m(or 8970m which is 7% faster in this game) run BF4 around 25% faster than the 770m, the 780m is 13% faster than the 7970m...but also more expensive.

Looking at other games, this is not a huge leap in performance that could be accredited to Mantle. You can see the performance of other games in a similar zone, naturally some games tend to prefer Nvidia or AMD so results vary within a margin.

As such, I don't see any big improvements that could be owed to Mantle in BF4...though I hope future games can prove me wrong =D.

 

In my opinion is that AMD the right way, so you don't have to worry that much

 

Hmm..so as to be expected, the new consoles will have a huge impact on PC Gaming. Is PS4 Nvidia and Xbox 1 AMD? Multi-platform games will most likely be made for the weakest machine, which appears to be the Xbox 1. Would this make Mantle more of a player? I would think so on the surface, but who knows. I want to go with AMD again, but if Nvidia keeps outperforming on the driver front, the 770m at 100 bucks cheaper in a Sager makes more sense.

 

No one knows what the real world impact of Mantle will be. It could be as huge as current gen AMD cards challenging Nvidia's Maxwells (in Mantle supported games), or it might not be such a huge thing after all. This kind of news are exciting though: pCARS developer: Mantle will offer 70-80% of next-gen console performance (regarding draw calls) | DSOGaming | The Dark Side Of Gaming

 

Mantle is not out yet. Its supposed to be realeased for BF4 sometime this month.

 

If I was personally buying the computer, I would go with Nvidia. Now I say this while not liking Nvidia the company. I feel Nvidia overprices all their cards because they can get away with it. I want AMD to win but from all I've read Nvidia has better drivers and people will downplay Enduros's problems here but go on any other site and you will hear about Enduro's problems. Now Optimus(Nvidia's verision of GPU switching) also has problems but nowhere near AMD's. As well as if you ever decide to go dual GPU, SLI(Nvidia) works better than Crossfire(AMD). You want the opinion of many and not just this one site. Do your research type in optimus vs enduro. and SLI vs Crossfire. Good Luck.


Also as a side note, I decided to get a computer that doesn't use Optimus or Enduro because I did not want to deal with trying to customize some games or programs that will not use the correct GPU unless tweaked with.

 

That is not true. This site has had the loudest community pushing AMD to fix Enduro. Most of the issues are now fixed, and most remaining issues are dependent on the games you play. Enduro is not downplayed here.

Now I haven't followed what's been happening on the notebook double gpu frontier, but at least in the desktop cards Crossfire has caught up with SLI. Both have their problems, and if you go to Nvidia's forum you'll see people complaining about SLI, and if you go to AMD forum you'll see people complaining about Crossfire, but in the end they are more or less the same.

 

I've owned both Nvidia and AMD on laptops and I have to downright say driver installation on the nvidia was easy peasy. The AMD on the other hand, took me a few tweaks, maybe it was because I was using modded drivers However, the AMD has surprised me with performance and ran still rather cool (normal temperature). Also, the eyefinity works great! I hooked up another monitor on the P150SM and playing battlefield 4 with 2 screens didn't affect much of the performance hit e.g. it still ran 40-60 fps.

 

Well if you are modding drivers then there would be a few tweaks

 

The 8255 allows for four drives and a optical drive, which is one more than the 8265. I tgink you sumorized the points for the 770 versus 8970. I would see if I could somehow upgrade to the 780m. Maybe some other upgrades that you can do later.

The mouse glitches are in just a few games, and I belive there is a fix or workaround. I just ordered my np8275-S with Windows 8.1.

 

I was just looking at the 8275-S, probably the best deal on Sager's at the moment for a 17". What did you configure it with?

 

Yeah the NP8255 is a bit heavier but offers that extra 2.5" 7mm bay which is perfect for an SSD.

 

PS-4, Xbox-1 and the Wii U are all AMD GPU's, Nvidia is not in any of th major consoles this time around. ( the PS-4 and XB-1 are both AMD APU units. )

but back on topic, for gaming on a budget I would still go 8970m myself.

 

i7-4800, 780m, 16GB ram, 1TB 7200, blu-ray burner. I went for the 17" over the 15" because of the bigger power supply for more oc room, and the overall size was not that much bigger, and of course the bigger screen.

 

The 17 inch comes with an extra power phase and copper cooler for the cpu too.

 

I got a Clevo P370SM recently with AMD Radeon HD 8970M and it runs everything smoothly, of course with every game you have to play about with the Graphics settings to get the optimal quality/FPS. However, it has ran everything I have thrown at it in the past week on HIGH settings at 40-60+ FPS. Including games like Splinter Cell Blacklist, MOH: Warfighter, Metro 2033, Metro Last Light (looks epic!)...etc

Really glad I went for the 8970M, kinda makes me think that nVidia is just charging extortionate prices for their drivers. The strange thing is though, I haven't had any issues with AMD Catalyst drivers yet at all. So really, nVidia can go suck my gentleman's vegetable if they think I'm gonna be stupid enough to buy into their overpriced shizz.

 

I wouldn't go AMD. I've had so many problems with their laptop drivers and still have performance issues. It's been 2 years and it's still pretty bad on lots of DX9 games. They won't be getting another penny from me.

 

Which games exactly?

I've ran many DX9 games and not had any issues.

Perhaps the games you're playing are just badly coded?

 

DX9 games were fixed in the latest driver version, soooo..

 

World of tanks mostly. Runs fine on my older nvidia laptop and any desktop cards. Utilization has been problematic. I'm more upset by the fact that for 2 years of ownership the first year it was working half assed for the first half. The drivers have also caused me a number of issues and I've had to re-image my machine. I've never had any issues with AMD's desktop drivers or any of Nvidia's drivers, but their mobile ones seem far more finicky. It's just shoddy work by AMD. Running 13.11 and it's still crap, unless you mean the latest beta.

 

Read the post above mate, nearly everything has been fixed with the latest beta drivers. Mentioning the last 2 years is pretty pointless considering all improvements came within the last few months.

Also, you should read this post:
Tom's Hardware's AMA With AMD, In Its Entirety - Uninstalling Drivers, The Radeon HD 7750, And Kaveri At APU13

People that arent on Radeons might miss out on fun stuff in the near future, the bit I really like is this:

 

Mentioning the last two years is not pointless, it is his point. How would you feel if you just bought a graphics card, and they didn't fix issues for two years? That said, they don't seem to have issues with the current line up.

 

I can only say i own a P150 for over a year now, equipped with a Radeon 7970M, and have absolutely no regrets whatsoever.
True, I participated in the drivers game for a couple of months, supported our complaints to AMD in different forums and sites, BUT i truly never had any actual issues, the complaints were mostly for the sake of having the best software possible for my hardware.
I learned a lot in the process so i should probably thank AMD for the ride.
I actually have not been around for months, and came here only to browse and check the latest news.
I am not sure wich driver version i have right now, but i dont really care anymore, everything runs smoothly and at ultra settings.
AMD had its share of problems, no questions about it, but IMHO they finally put their act together and fixed their issues.

That said i recommend AMD cards eyes closed, its price and performance are unparalleled and i smile everytime i see my card perform better than Nvidia 680M (its counterpart) in many games and tasks.

In the end is a matter of taste and personality, if you like to spend a lot of money for having the least chance of any kind of trouble go for nividia, its definitely the card for the rich and lazy, if, on the other hand, you like to spend your money wisely and get a brute diamond to shape and polish to perfection get AMD.

IMHO.

 

I'd take the 780M over the 7970M (It's worth the money) but the 8970M over the 770M.