ASUS U30Jc: Refining Thin and Light Performance
by Jarred Walton on May 18, 2010 11:23 PM ESTASUS U30Jc Gaming Performance
Thanks to the discrete GeForce 310M GPU, the U30Jc is also capable of handling most games at native resolution. In most cases, modern titles will need to run at low/minimum detail to achieve playability, but older titles and less demanding games will allow you to turn up some of the settings. We also added Battlefield: Bad Company 2 to our gaming results thanks to reader requests.
All of the games we tested were at least playable at 1366x768, with one exception. Mass Effect 2 really stresses the GPU subsystem on low-end GPUs, so it chugs along at sub-20 FPS in many areas. Likewise, we tried Dragon Age: Origins and found that it runs in the upper teens—a different engine than ME2, but apparently Bioware makes games that run similarly. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is borderline playable, hovering just below 30FPS; what's interesting to note is that even with a much more powerful GPU, the M11x turns in lower frame rates in BFBC2. Battlefield games have always been rather demanding on the CPU side of the equation, and BC2 appears to continue that trend.
Of the remaining titles, Batman is able to run at Medium or High detail depending on your preference for smooth gameplay (you'll get short dips into the teens on High). Empire: Total War manages to deliver acceptable performance at Medium detail, and the current Optimus driver prevents us from choosing anything higher. (It appears that ETW looks at the capabilities of the Intel HD Graphics for determining available quality settings, even though it's definitely running on the 310M.) Left 4 Dead 2 runs fine at Medium but takes a pretty sharp drop moving up to High and there's definitely choppiness during the zombie mob sequences. Stalker looks like a 2005 game on minimum detail; bump things up one notch (low + dynamic object lighting) and you're looking at 2007 quality and equivalent performance. Anything more than that and you drop into the low 20s and teens.
As a gaming system, the U30Jc works okay but there will certainly be titles where performance is too low to run at 1366x768. Mass Effect 2 runs much better at 1024x600, but moving to a non-native resolution results in some fuzziness. If gaming is an important criterion for you, we'd recommend looking at other options. The Alienware M11x does quite well in games and should work for a while, provided you don't run into a driver issue down the road. Most other gaming capable laptops are going to be 14" or larger chassis, like the 14" Sony VAIO VPCCW22FX (i3 CPU with GT 330M) or the 15.6" Acer 5740G. ASUS also has a 14" ASUS N82J (i5-430M CPU with GT 335M) coming out that should still last 6+ hours on battery while combining a much more powerful GPU with Optimus Technology (something the Sony VAIO currently lacks).
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rootheday - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Is your data on gaming issues on Intel based on testing with recent drivers? If not, can you check these titles with an updated driver and confirm? From my own experience, most of the titles listed are not a problem any more.GRID, Mass Effect (and Mass Effect 2) are fixed in most recent Intel drivers; Referring back to an earlier article (http://www.anandtech.com/show/2818/8), Dark Athena was fixed in Intel drivers last fall.
Dirt 2 is fixed with latest game patch.
Fallout 3 is a bit trickier - it looks like the ISV assumed Intel was below min spec and hardcoded anti-Intel bias into the app. The proof/workaround is here: http://forums.techgage.com/showthread.php?t=5052 - if you get use this modified version of the d3d runtime dll to tell the app that it is running on NVidia, the game runs just fine on Intel HD graphics.
Dragon Age: Origins - I'm not sure what you are referring to here - other Anandtech articles say that it runs on Intel HD graphics at least as well as AMD integrated - see for example http://www.anandtech.com/show/2921/3 or http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/4.
In a similar vein, is the comment about Flash 10.1 based on recent drivers/Flash releases?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I'll check with the latest drivers. The last I tested on laptops was a couple weeks ago, and all of the games I mentioned failed. Interesting Fallout 3 note; Oblivion appears to have the same hard coding of Intel bias. I'll be working on an article with an i3 + IGP setup, so I'll be sure to try everything I can to make it work this time. :-)JarredWalton - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
I checked and you're right: the very latest driver finally fixes DiRT 2 and GRID (and actually provides decent performance all told, provided you run at a lower resolution than 1366x768). Fallout 3 I can get to load and start benchmarking with the hacked d3d.dll, but it crashes after 20-40 seconds and the only way to recover is to open task manager and force-kill the Fallout 3 executable. Perhaps I just need to start a new save, though? I'll try that and see if it helps at all....rootheday - Friday, May 21, 2010 - link
Google search shows lots of people have suggestions for crashes with Fallout; this one looked promising...Try adding these 2 lines to Fallout.ini in Documents\My Games\Fallout3 under [General]bUseThreadedAI=1
iNumHWThreads=2
Seems like there is a threading bug in the game engine that shows up on quad core systems - since Core i3/i5 have hyperthreading, they look like quad core...
Worth a try?
JarredWalton - Friday, May 21, 2010 - link
So the INI tweaks worked... at least the game doesn't crash while playing it for 30+ minutes. It does crash when you exit, but in my experience that has always been the case when enabling threading on Fallout 3/Oblivion... though perhaps it was just the threaded audio with Oblivion? I may need to check that as well. LOL. It's "playable" if you don't mind some choppiness. I find FO3 needs around 40 FPS to really run well, and with all the LOD scaling it's hard to determine exactly if two PCs render things the same. They appear to, in which case the Intel HD Graphics (plus DLL hack) gives performance about equal to the HD 4200.aguilpa1 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
nothing to see here..., move alongajp_anton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I've never understood your x264 playback test for battery life. Is it x264 (= encoding) or is it playback (= decoding)?If it's playback, are you using a software decoder or DXVA?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
The x264 battery life test is playing back a 720p ~6.8Mbit video using Media Player Classic Home Cinema, with DXVA enabled (unless we're using Atom, in which case we use the CoreAVC decoder). So it's sort of a Blu-ray-without-the-disc test. FWIW, I've done the same test with a 1080p 10Mbit video and the battery life was about the same (with a couple percent).ajp_anton - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Thank you. I've seen the x264/h.264 mistake made in many places, the description of the x264 test in your CPU reviews comes to mind.x264 is one of many h.264 encoders.
crydee - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I wanted one of those UL or U laptops form asus. But the price just isn't right. For 850 I can get a studio 15 with a full 1080p screen, led keyboard, ati 4850 512mb, 4gb ram, 500gb hdd, a 9 cell battery and a core i5 processor.The only thing I'm going to miss is the ability to turn off second gpu at ease to save battery.