Video Card reccommended for a laptop?

[Salil]

Hello Friends,
I am trying to buy a laptop. i intend to play the latest games on it. Most of the laptops that I lookup have a ATI Radeon 9000 IGP card with 128 MB Shared memory or Radeon 200 . I had a few questions related to this:

1. Are these cards good enough to play games like DOOM3 and Half life 2?
2. What is shared memory? Is it like using the external RAM memory? Is this a good enough option or should I go for a video card that has an integrated memory?
3. Can somebody give me the hierarchy of ATI Radeon cards like which cards are the latest and which are older?
4. What should be the 3DMark score of a laptop configuration if I have to play something like DOOM3 and Half-life 2?

 

[JPB]

I seriously doubt you will be able to run Doom 3 on a laptop with 9000 IGP...if the 9000 is anything like the desktop ATi 9000. Desktop video cards will not work in a laptop. There simply not made for it. Shared memory is system ram...that dedicates up to 128 MB to the video.

 

[KBTuning]

start looking at new laptops.... those things are ancient....

find atleast a 6800Go or go for a 7800Go in the new laptops from dell...
on the ATi side my neighbor had a laptop w/ a A64 3800 and a X600 in it and it ran World of Warcraft smoother than i had ever seen....

 

[kellehair]

I just got a laptop with a 128MB X300 and I've been very impressed so far. I'm not really looking to play the newest FPS on my laptop however.

 

[Salil]

Can somebody give me the hierarchy of ATI Radeon cards for the laptop. Like I know Radeon x1800 is the latest and I guess Radeon 9000 would be pretty late. Is a X300 much better than a 9000?

 

[Wreckage]

A laptop with the 7800go would be your best bet.

These laptops can often be expenive and or large so shop around.

Don't forget that a high end gaming laptop will not be very kind to the battery life.

 

[mphartzheim]

The laptop I bought for gaming had an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128mb card in it. That card would have done just fine, but I also got a widescreen... with 1650x1080 native resolution. That resolution killed that video card.

Lesson to learn is to balance your video card selection with the native resolution of the monitor.

 

[Salil]

I can get a ATI Radeon 9700 128 MB. Will this be good enough for DOOM 3 and half life 2? Can someone point me to a website that ranks video cards in relative order?

 

[Salil]

Originally posted by: kellehair
I just got a laptop with a 128MB X300 and I've been very impressed so far. I'm not really looking to play the newest FPS on my laptop however.

Does your laptop play DOOM3 and half life with x300?

 

[KeithTalent]

Ok Salil, here is a list of ATI cards with all of the important information:
ATI Cards

This lists all of the non-mobility cards, but IIRC the Mobility line are just underclocked versions of the regular cards.

Secondly, yes you can play most of the latest and greatest games on the X300, you just have to turn all/most of the settings to low. I can play HL2, BF2, CS: Source, plus the demos of FEAR and COD2 with decent framerates, though I have modded my GPU a bit. See my response to the post here: X300?

Anyway, I hope that helps.

Cheers, KT.

 

[crazydingo]

Mobile GPU Comparision Guide

Hope that helps.

 

[Salil]

Hey, why do all you guys say that very high end video cards are recommended? Looking at a lot of reviews for DOOM3 I can see that one can run above 30 FPS with ATI X9700 unless you have anisotropic filtering and anti aliasing turned on? I believe 30 FPS is a decent rate. Of course these reviews were done with these cards installed on desktops. So would it be much lower for laptops?

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: Salil
Hey, why do all you guys say that very high end video cards are recommended? Looking at a lot of reviews for DOOM3 I can see that one can run above 30 FPS with ATI X9700 unless you have anisotropic filtering and anti aliasing turned on? I believe 30 FPS is a decent rate. Of course these reviews were done with these cards installed on desktops. So would it be much lower for laptops?

30 FPS is acceptable, but if you are playing multiplayer you definitely want higher than that if you can get it. For example I turned up a couple of setting on BF2 yesterday just to see what it looked like and boy did it look great, but my FPS dropped from mid 40s/mid50s to high 20s/low 30s causing me to die a lot sooner than I normally would have (at least I kept telling myself that was the reason).

Also, if you want to be able to game at a decent resolution and turn on some of the eye candy you need a better card. My x300 is acceptable for now because it has to be, but playing at higher resolutions and with AA/AF is so nice that I will definitely be going as high as I can go on my vid card when I build my new pc in a few months.

KT

 

[Salil]

Hello Friends,
I have decided to go for a DELL Inspiron 9100 with 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9700 128. What do you guys think?

 

[Ronin]

Better question that's very easy to answer: What's your budget?

 

[Salil]

Well actually I have already ordered it from eBay and the processor speed is 2.8Ghz.

 

[mphartzheim]

Originally posted by: Salil
Hello Friends,
I have decided to go for a DELL Inspiron 9100 with 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9700 128. What do you guys think?

Depends on how picky you are. That's the notebook that I got, however I have 1 GB of RAM in it. If you see my previous comments, the high resolution widescreen monitor just kills most games. You'll have to have 1) crappy framerates, 2) lowest possible detail settings, and/or 3) lower resolution (which will result in a blurry screen).

If you're not picky about framerates and/or high detail settings, then that system WILL play just about any game that you want it to.

 

[Ronin]

The 9700 Mobility was a decent card. You should be fine.

 

[Salil]

Originally posted by: mphartzheim

Originally posted by: Salil
Hello Friends,
I have decided to go for a DELL Inspiron 9100 with 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9700 128. What do you guys think?

Depends on how picky you are. That's the notebook that I got, however I have 1 GB of RAM in it. If you see my previous comments, the high resolution widescreen monitor just kills most games. You'll have to have 1) crappy framerates, 2) lowest possible detail settings, and/or 3) lower resolution (which will result in a blurry screen).

If you're not picky about framerates and/or high detail settings, then that system WILL play just about any game that you want it to.

Why should the high resolution of the screen kill the video card? If so can't we reduce the resolution of the monitor? I want to play doom 3 at atleast 1024 * 800 kind of resolution. I don't care much about anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering etc.

 

[mphartzheim]

The system isn't capable of pushing a lot of games at that resolution (1650x1080). Because of the nature of LCD displays, they need to be run at their native resolution for a crisp, clear display (which is why a lot of gamers still prefer CRT displays for playing games). Dropping the resolution on an LCD will cause a blurring of many details, mostly noticable on text.

Don't get me wrong, I love my 9100 and I use it almost exclusively for gaming. I'm just finding more games that I can't run at the settings I want to run them at because of the limitations of my monitor. Most notable game is World of Warcraft. At native resolution and all detail settings at their very lowest, I get around 20-25 fps... and that drops into the single digits when there are more than 20 other players on the screen.

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: Salil

Originally posted by: mphartzheim

Originally posted by: Salil
Hello Friends,
I have decided to go for a DELL Inspiron 9100 with 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9700 128. What do you guys think?

Depends on how picky you are. That's the notebook that I got, however I have 1 GB of RAM in it. If you see my previous comments, the high resolution widescreen monitor just kills most games. You'll have to have 1) crappy framerates, 2) lowest possible detail settings, and/or 3) lower resolution (which will result in a blurry screen).

If you're not picky about framerates and/or high detail settings, then that system WILL play just about any game that you want it to.

Why should the high resolution of the screen kill the video card? If so can't we reduce the resolution of the monitor? I want to play doom 3 at atleast 1024 * 800 kind of resolution. I don't care much about anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering etc.

I think he means you will just get a crappy frame rate at native res. Yeah, of course you can play at lower res, it just will not look as good. I don't know about a blurry screen though, I never play at my native res (unless I want to watch a slideshow) and I don't actually find it blurry, just less detailed, not the same thing IMO.