Toshiba Qosmio X775: Toshiba's Gamer Grows Up

Gaming Performance

While the Toshiba Qosmio X775 and its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M don't jump whole hog into the highest end of mobile gaming hardware, there's enough performance here to merit a pretty broad look at it across our spectrum of tests. Note that it features a screen with a 1600x900 native resolution; while I'm not a fan of that resolution on 17.3" notebooks, you'll see it does seem to be about the right resolution for the GTX 560M.

Right away from our medium tests, you can see why the 560M probably didn't need this suite of tests run. We tend to want to test performance class GPUs like the 560M and Radeon HD 6800M series at our medium and high presets, but the 560M bridges the gap between high and ultra. Medium settings barely put a dent in the 560M. That said, for whatever reason the Qosmio seems to suffer some overhead compared to our other i7-2630QM systems in StarCraft II; hopefully moving the bottleneck further to the GPU will let the Qosmio shine.

Somehow the ASUS G73SW continues to be a freak of nature, outperforming the Qosmio X775 despite the X775's more recent drivers and 100MHz core clock advantage. The X775's performance isn't bad necessarily and the clocks are running at spec, though the benchmarks it leads in, the leads are fairly slight. As with PCMark, there appears to be some optimization left on the table, or possibly the use of Optimus is having a slight impact on performance.

There it is. At our ultra setting, the 560M finally begins to break away from its predecessor, though we don't seem to be quite there yet in terms of pure performance. Given that the 460M and 560M have the same memory bandwidth, there are likely some titles where that's the bottleneck. Ultimately, though, the GeForce GTX 560M is by no means a bad gaming GPU, but it still can't hang with the top end graphics hardware. This is a mainstream gaming part best suited for 900p or 1080p, but definitely not with 4xAA enabled on all titles.