Toshiba A665-3DV: 3D or Not 3D?

Comparative Gaming Benchmarks

What follows is a core dump of all the gaming results, at low, medium, and high detail settings (as determined by our testing). All of the games are technically 3D Vision capable, though some have lesser ratings—i.e. DiRT 2 is listed as "Poor". The only reason we're including the Low detail settings on the A665-3DV is so we can give yet another look at 3D Vision capability. We'll include the 3D score for each of the titles. Along with DiRT 2's "Poor" score, note that Mass Effect 2 is rated "Fair" while StarCraft II and Left 4 Dead 2 have a "Good" rating. STALKER: Call of Pripyat isn't in the official list, but the benchmark lists it as "Excellent" and detects it as STALKER: Clear Sky. Let's first look at the Low gaming results.

First, let me state that while many of the games rate less than acceptable for 3D Vision, I actually thought most looked fine at our low quality test settings—many of the effects that break the 3D look are not enabled. DiRT 2 for instance looked better than some of the other games I thought, despite a "poor" rating. StarCraft II on the other hand is absolutely not a game I'd play in 3D. The buildings seem to "float" and the 3D effect is distracting at best. STALKER: Call of Pripyat (at least the benchmark version we use) had some clear issues, with a sort of lurching feel in 3D mode. I would disqualify the score, and perhaps the full game shows better performance than what we experienced, but NVIDIA recommends setting lighting to "static" which largely disables all of the better graphics effects. (We tested with lighting enabled, so perhaps that explains the "lurching".)

As far as non-3D performance goes, the GTS 350M manages to top the charts in nearly every one of our games. BFBC2 is one game where a couple other laptops are able to hang with the A665-3DV, and it may be a case that it has a graphics memory bandwidth bottleneck (the 350M has the same 128-bit GPU RAM bus clocked at 1580MHz as the GT 330M/335M). StarCraft II is the other exception to the rule, with the ATI-based laptops posting clearly higher numbers. It may be that those laptops were using an older driver that didn't render everything properly, however, so take the scores with a  grain of salt. There's really no reason why HD 5470 or HD 4650 should ever outperform the GTS 350M if they're doing the same workload.

Crank things up to medium detail and the GTS 350M continues to post playable results in all of our titles. We're at or above 40FPS across the board, and this is really the sweet spot for the A665-3DV. BFBC2 and SC2 still show some performance oddities as discussed above, likely for the same reasons. In case you're wondering, we did run some of the 3D Vision results, but the only game to break the 30FPS mark with 3D and "medium" detail from our suite is DiRT 2. Unfortunately, at medium a bunch of the graphics effects start to interfere with the 3D experience.