Z and Gaming (Which resolution screen?)

Now that the Z has a dedicated 9300M GS chipset, what kind of gaming can we expect? I'm not going to play Crysis, but perhaps some older games like HL2, oblivion, etc. I tried this on my TZ and obviously failed miserably.

I'd LOVE to get the 1600 resolution for surfing, etc but I might be shooting myself in the foot game-wise. Should I go for the lower res laptop, which essentially is what I have now on the TZ? Or do you guys think that this nVidia card won't cut it at either resolution, in which case i'll just bite the bullet and go hi-res. Thoughts?

 

I think at lower res, the Z will handle it okay. The TZ really does not have any power for gaming.

 

i can only tell u i have a dell with a shameful video card: ati 64mb
hehe..
ive been able to play assassins creed on it with low settings, but still could play a gg... so... i think there is an answer to ur question about games. the other one didnt really understood

 

Here is a promising quote in an article I found:

Compared to the old 8400M G, the 9300M GS has a higher core speed and is therefore faster. Modern DirectX 10 games will run only in low details and resolutions. Older DirectX 9 games, like HalfLife 2 or Far Cry run fluently in medium to high details.

Found at Notebook Check

 

Running a game at a higher resolution like 1600x900 will take significantly more power. Since the Z has the option of this higher-res screen, I'm wondering if its worth the investment for a moderate gamer.

 

ohhh well as fas as i know games can only run in the resolution u put in the game, independent what u have on ur screen... so ie: warcraft 3 will only run on 1200*800 or sumthing like that, regardless ur screen has 1600*900.

as i told u... i could be wrong, but thats what ive always get about games.

 

All I can say is that I doubt the 9400 will be able to handle any games very well at 1600x900, other than really old ones. I think the low-res version of the Z at 1366x768 should be more than enough for games, and you'll get much better frame rates.

Of course there's always the option of switching to a non-native resolution for games, but that looks ugly.

 

I agree - Pre-ordering a 1366 res Z now... Only other mod i'll make is 3GB and 7200RPM drive.

 

Keep in mind that if you order 1366, it only comes with 128MB VRAM instead of 256MB from 1600.

 

AFAIK the only (US) model with 256 MB of ram is the $4000 one. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: Never mind, it looks like the CTO 1600x900 models actually do have the 256 MB version. Interesting.

Even so, more RAM isn't going to help that much at higher resolutions for a card like the 9400, where most likely performance issues will be due to lack of raw pixel processing power, rather than memory to store the pixels.

 

Any Z with 1600x900 screen comes with dedicated 256 MB VRAM.

 

If you get the 1600x900 screen, you can always run at a lower resolution and it'll still look quite nice.

I've run several games on my brother's desktop at the native resolution vs lower upscaled and barely saw a difference, it wasn't worth the drop in performance.

What I would love to do is buy the Z and at home, connect a high-end, external videocard to it and game on my HDTV as I can get 4gb of ram for it, it has a fast processor and chipset, just the videocard is the weak link.

I haven't heard much about the Asus XG Station and it still uses a mid-end videocard because the bandwidth from the Expresscard slot in laptops is too narrow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XG_Station

 

I agree that the added RAM is probably NOT the issue here, and its more one of performance. I did order the highest proc and did 4gb, so i'm sure i'll be able to run whatever... just anything more than peggle and bookworm adventures please....

 

Check out the benchmarks for the Asus VX3 using the same videocard.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=221306

 

Hmm. It's nice that you can get the 256MB card with the 1600x900 screen, but personally I'm still gonna stick with the 1366x768 and 128MB card. The 256MB version would be nice if I could get it without paying so much for the 1600x900 also, but really any game that's going to require more than 128MB of VRAM most likely won't run above 5 or 10 FPS anyway because it will be expecting a really fast card, which the 9400 isn't.

 

Im wondering this but for Games like HL2, Day of defeat source and more over WoW. I think WoW should be able to be run at high settings @ 1600X900. Maybe even with AF and AA Also the Z has DDR3 RAM and the VRAM is also DDR3 if im not mistaken.

 

I don't think the video card on the asus is a 9300m gs. Looking at the post it says 9300m G. The 9300m GS is different from the G; the GS only has 8 Cores vs 16 on the G. How this effects performance, we won't know till we see real benchmarks from someone.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_9300m_gs.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_9300m_g.html


also this is the closest thing i can find between the 16 cores vs 8 cores since i think the 9300m is prob based on the same cores.

http://en.expreview.com/2007/12/04/born-for-hd-first-review-of-g98-8400gs/?page=13

 

The Z will be powerful enough to run games like HL2. The lower resolution Z is better suited for gamers.

 

I'm thinking about switching from sz to z in september. In Europe the lowest modell comes for a very good price. I'm also thinking about gaming with the z, with my sz i'm running games for 2 years now. But for me the question is also which model i should take; the low-res maybe better for games but wenn the 1600 dots screen is able to run games in lower resulutions and did this without loosing to much quality, it would be fine!

 

the 9300mgs is also 550 core speed though

 

Ah thats intresting. If I buy a Z with a 1600x900 resolution, do I have a native resolution like 1366x768?
Or does only look the 1600x900 Resolution good?

 

You can try it yourself, play a game where you can change the resolution...

For example you got an 1280x1024 monitor...

Change the in game resolution to 1024x768, it will look almost the same just not so detailed, but it probably won't look horrible....

The same thing you will do on the Z instead playing at 1600x900 you will play at 1366x768....

 

Mhm bad.
If you switch my Resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 it looks bad X_x
Mhm I think I should buy the Version with an 1366x768 screen T_T

 

Yes that's what happens if you don't use the native resolution of your display.

 

I'm just wondering; isn't it the case that most games don't even support the 1366x768 resolution??

 

There's only one "native resolution" for an LCD monitor, but at 1600x900, you could conceivably set the resolution to 800x450 without any blurring problems (since you'd get an even 2:1 pixel scaling), but that's pretty low.

It completely depends on the game. Some games, generally older ones, give a fixed list of resolutions to choose from, which isn't good for widescreens / unusual resolutions (although in some cases you can find how to manually edit some config files and change this). Most newer games though should support at least your monitor's native resolution, but again it's up to the programmer to query the hardware for supported resolutions and provide these to the user.

 

And the 9300 GS can probably only reasonably handle those older games...

Yet, I think that most of those older games (that give you a list of resolutions to choose from), don't support 1600x900 either...

 

Does anyone know if I can play CS:S on this notebook?

 

That's halflife engine, right? So i would think you'd be OK... but we'll know for sure once they start arriving in our hands...