Gateway ID49: Mixing the Bag

High Gaming and 3DMarks

As I mentioned on the previous page, driver bugs in Optimus prevented us from running Left 4 Dead 2 with 4xAA, so those results are omitted here. The GT 330M isn't really cut out for anti-aliasing or gaming above 1366x768 anyhow, making those results mainly academic, but it still would've been nice to see it really reach for the stars in a game that's traditionally pretty forgiving of video hardware.

Once we move to our "High" preset, the 330M in the ID49C takes a swan dive and can only produce playable settings in Mass Effect 2 and, arguably, StarCraft II and DiRT 2 (only at native resolution.) As we said before, the results are academic, but they do serve to illustrate the immense gulf in performance between the mainstream-class graphics processors and their high-end kin. In fairness, though, these are settings the 330M wasn't really made to run.

Once we get to 3DMark, the GeForces start to accel, though 3DMark03 and to a lesser extent 05 seem to have some issues with being CPU limited. That's fair; 3DMark03 is seven years old at this point and wasn't designed to run graphics hardware this fast. It's still sad watching the G 310M and HD 5470 trail the mainstream parts, though. The solid i5-450M in the ID49C gives the GT 330M the support it needs to rank consistently high on these charts, and in 3DMark06 and Vantage the ID49C comes into its own and slots in right where it ought to be.