Gaming laptop with Widi? Is it possible?

[IamDavid]

Wanting to by a new gaming laptop ~$2K. Been reading a little on Widi but havent seen anything specificly saying whats possible.. I'd love to have a laptop I can connect to my HDTV's throughout the house.

 

[lsv]

Most newer laptops have Widi support via the wireless card such as the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 or other newer mini wifi cards.

 

[IamDavid]

Thanks for the quick response.

Does it just "work" or is it able to fully stream any game to my 60" LG?

 

[lsv]

This guy says it 'just works'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcCALVOqYaA

 

[Bill Brasky]

I've read WiDi is *not* ok for gaming. The intended used is for streaming movies and other video content. There is a .5 second lag between what is happening on the laptop display and the tv, which sounds horrible for gaming.

When googling around, I found a little blurb on Anandtech:

"How about gaming? WiDi 1.0 apparently had latency of around 0.5 seconds, which makes it practically useless for anything more than viewing movies and perhaps browsing the web (though even with browsing, using the mouse and seeing a half second delay would be super agravating). WiDi 2.0, at least on this particular notebook, appears to have trimmed latency down to around 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. This makes it far more useful if you're using the mouse, but even then there's a noticeable lag. For FPS gaming, the delay is unacceptable. RTS games would probably be out of the question as well, unless you're not into measuring your CPM (clicks per minute). I did try both types of games, and I quickly stopped playing after feeling a bit motion sick because of the difference between when I expected things to happen and when they actually happened on the screen. Yuck. One type of game still worked alright, however: driving simulations (and potentially flight sims as well). I played a few races of DiRT 2, and because turning, stopping, accelerating, etc. aren't instantaneous, the .1 second delay didn't bother me much. Of course, YMMV."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4649/mythlogic-pollux-1400-clevos-w150hr-tested/8

 

[lsv]

I've read WiDi is *not* ok for gaming. The intended used is for streaming movies and other video content. There is a .5 second lag between what is happening on the laptop display and the tv, which sounds horrible for gaming.

Good point, it also uses GPU cycles to compress the stream.

 

[marcplante]

oh, plus you need a Widi receiver, which you can also replicate with a DLNA BluRay player if you're just streaming. I was thinking about using a media extender, but not sure about latency or full KVM capabilities.

 

[nickb64]

Doesn't WiDi only work on the Intel IGPs? I could swear I read that somewhere. That's not a huge issue if you want to use it for something like streaming movies off the laptop to the TV, but it would pretty much defeat any idea of gaming over it. Latency would also probably be an issue.

 

[littlezipp]

You may want to look at Alienware's Wireless HD if you haven't purchased already. Same principle but low latency so you can game on it.

http://www.alienware.com/landings/wirelessHD.aspx?ref=WirelessHD