Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops
by Jarred Walton on September 17, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
High Detail Gaming and 3DMark
We also ran a few games at higher detail settings to really drive the point home. Even at 1280x800, these mobile GPUs struggle in many modern titles, and cranking up the details levels is not at all recommended.
There's nothing really new here, other than frame rates becoming even lower. The results in 3DMark don't necessarily mean a lot in terms of real gaming performance, but it is somewhat interesting that the M-152XL is faster in 3DMark03 and slower in 05/Vantage. 3DMark06 seems to correlate the best with our gaming results, where in the majority of games the ATI and NVIDIA options are essentially tied. The Acer and AVADirect of course offer the same performance, since the two GPUs are simply different names for the same chip. There are a few minor variations caused by drivers, but otherwise everything is well within the margin of error.
Something not shown in the gaming charts is that performance even at low or medium detail settings often remains unacceptable at 1280x800. As an example, Mass Effect at minimum detail settings (which still looks decent) struggled to get above 20 FPS. Race Driver: GRID fares a little better, reaching around 25 FPS, but the loss in visual detail is far more noticeable than in Mass Effect. Crysis is another title that really isn't intended for GPUs of this level, regardless of settings. In short, you'll want to limit yourself to older games or low to medium detail levels (at best) with midrange mobile GPUs. To summarize the gaming equation, we hope the following table makes things clear:
| 1280x800 Performance vs. GeForce 9800M GTS (Gateway P-7811) | ||||
| Acer 6920G | AVADirect FL-92 |
Gateway M-152XL |
Gateway P-7811 FX |
|
| Assassin's Creed DX9 | 50.04% | 50.80% | 53.58% | 100% |
| Assassin's Creed DX10 | 44.97% | 43.60% | 52.16% | 100% |
| Company of Heroes DX9 | 31.45% | 30.62% | 33.67% | 100% |
| Company of Heroes DX10 | 32.27% | 30.91% | 30.00% | 100% |
| Crysis - Medium | 50.26% | 44.40% | 55.78% | 100% |
| Crysis - High | 42.91% | 39.71% | 48.02% | 100% |
| Devil May Cry 4 | 32.78% | 31.59% | 23.83% | 100% |
| ET Quake Wars 0xAA | 39.02% | 40.17% | 39.96% | 100% |
| ET Quake Wars 4xAA | 30.67% | 31.96% | 26.55% | 100% |
| Race Driver: GRID 0xAA | 34.80% | 37.14% | 39.06% | 100% |
| Mass Effect | 41.83% | 37.38% | 48.05% | 100% |
| Oblivion | 35.31% | 33.64% | 38.58% | 100% |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | 38.77% | 38.30% | 42.20% | 100% |
| Average All Games | 38.85% | 37.71% | 40.88% | 100% |
| 9800M GTS Advantage | 254.1% | 261.6% | 240.2% | 100.0% |
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Hrel - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Midrange graphics are great! Why would you expect to run any game on a laptop at high or max detail settings? Why do you care about detail settings? It doesn't effect how fun the game is. On a laptop, as long as you can run modern games at min-med settings and get decent frames that's all I would ever want. If you want to max everything out use your desktop. However, I would like to see the ability to turn off the discrete card and use integrated graphics become standard. And, in general, laptops need much better LCD's and better battery life, HP has a 24hour notebook, meaning the battery lasts 24 hours, LED backlight, why aren't LED backlights standard place?????JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
The HP "24 hour" notebook includes an extra battery attachment that sits under the notebook and weighs several pounds if I'm not mistaken. If you buy any of these laptops and six to eight extra batteries, you could get 24 hours as well. :-) Yeah, that's sort of extreme, but so is a huge battery sitting under a small laptop.As for midrange graphics and gaming, let me reiterate: running at 1280x800 I couldn't break 20 FPS in Mass Effect or Crysis even at minimum detail, and GRID at medium-low detail was playable but looked like a four year old graphics engine. There are plenty of other games that start looking quite poor before you break 30 FPS. Graphics aren't everything, true, but they do make a difference. That's not to say you can't play any games on these midrange GPUs, but I would hate to give people the mistaken impression that midrange mobile GPUs run most games "fine" when that's simply not true.
Midrange mobile graphics *aren't* great, and in fact even the fastest mobile GPUs are slower than desktop "midrange" graphics: the 9600 GT costs under $100 and outperforms the 9800M GTS, and the ~$110 8800 GT 512MB is faster than any mobile GPU. (Same for the HD 4670 and even HD 3850.) If you want to play modern games on a notebook, get the Gateway P-7811 or some other more powerful (and larger) notebook. Otherwise, the vast majority of people will be better off with a midrange desktop for gaming and a true midrange solution.
strikeback03 - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
For this very reason I'm wondering why you bothered running the full gaming tests on all of these. Wouldn't maybe a full test on one game plus minimum settings/resolution for the others be enough to offer a best case ceiling and say "See, don't look to play modern games on these"? Would save you significant time I'd imagine.JarredWalton - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
It would save time, but it wouldn't provide a ready comparison to other mobile GPUs, which is one thing I wanted to do. (That's also why I tested the Gateway M-152XL at settings other than 1280x800, just to show how the GPU would run with a different LCD.) If you just want 3DMark scores, you can find that at some other places, but no one plays 3DMark for fun.Another problem: if you choose just one game, which one should you go with? Assassin's Creed DX9 is roughly half the speed of the faster 9800M GTS, and while that's a big difference you can easily turn down a few settings and get acceptable performance at 1280x800. On the other hand CoH is about 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of the same GPU. The best characterization of performance requires more testing, so some people would want scores for TF2, HL2, and a bunch of older games as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
At least now I can point to a (relatively large) battery of gaming tests and say, "This is why you shouldn't plan on using low or midrange laptop GPUs for gaming. It's not just one or two games that will struggle, but a large number of newer titles won't run well regardless of settings, and others will only run well when you set the detail levels to 'ugly'." :)
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Edit: that last line is supposed to say "a true mobile solution".arjunp2085 - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Why is that i have never seen a Single AMD based laptops on the list....780G is one great solution for graphics on laptops.. Y is there no article about PUMA????
Is it some BIAS??
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
I could forward the list of email messages requesting AMD laptops to you if you'd like. I specifically asked a couple of companies for one of the HD 3200 laptops, because I think it's a very compelling platform. Why haven't I received one yet? No idea... but I'll check back with the contacts and hopefully get one soon.Voldenuit - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
For $1100, you can buy a Thinkpad T400.I don't see how anyone would prefer an Acer, Gateway, or AVADirect at these pricepoints.
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
It all depends on what you're after, but Lenovo is certainly a viable option. The T400 is good, but you'll probably want to spend more than $1100. I'd get 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, LED backlighting, 6-cell battery, Vista Home Premium, DVDR, 802.11N WiFi, and Bluetooth. That puts the price at around $1450, which includes $450 savings (limited time offer) and only a 1-year warranty. Bump it up to 3-years and you're at $1550, which is actually still very good. Without the $500 savings it would be difficult to recommend that much, however.Voldenuit - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
You can easily configure a great T400 w/ 2 GB RAM, DVD-burner, discrete Radeon 3470, wireless-N (only $15 extra), LED screen (only $60 extra) and 6-cell battery (only $15 extra) for under $1200.