The great conundrum of laptops and I would probably need to dedicate about three posts worth to actually explain all the weirdness of graphics chips, so I’ll try my best to explain in as simple and straightforward terms as possible, so you can get the best value and best performance for you.
Not as glamorous as their desktop counterparts, but these mobile cards can pack a punch
The big thing that really messed up the way graphics are seen in laptops are the integrated graphics and they have since become notorious for convoluting the market and misleading consumers. It’s become a little better, with more variation in terms of mobility graphics cards in laptops, however, there are some weird naming conventions which seem there to deliberately mislead. There are a few common things I noticed when researching this topic as an ordinary consumer.
First of all, if you are thinking at all about running any terms of graphically heavy applications, or games with the last few years, then the Intel GMA integrated graphics, regardless of the numbers or the ‘RAM’ they attach to it, which is simply reassigned system RAM as opposed to graphics RAM…anyway, let’s move on to some cold hard facts about the quality of some of the possible options you have with graphics cards and laptops.
As well as GMA chips, the next line of popular integrated chips some of the ATI Mobility Radeon’s, with the 3000 series being regularly used by some manufacturers as a way to provide moderately better graphics than most of the GMA chips. There are other examples, such as NVIDIA’s 9000 series, which appeared in quite a few laptops, including the Macbook Air. Don’t think that just because that the number on the card is comparable to that of the desktop equivalent, as we’ll soon learn, there is a lot of weird naming conventions that go on with graphics, some of them pretty shady.
You would’ve thought that the higher the numbers, the better. It would make sense to be able to gauge how powerful a card is, determined of course my manufacturers, by how high the number is. Well, what tends to happen is as production technically moves on to a new generation, for example, from the NVIDIA 200 to 300 mobility series and the ATI (soon to be AMD) 4000 to 5000 series is that the older cards often get repurposed as lower versions of the new line of cards. Confused? Let me give you an example: The NVIDIA 310M is actually a 240M, and will give almost identical performance. This kind of thing is common practice, so it pays to be careful.
There is a temptation by a lot of manufacturers to go over the top with gaming laptops design
There are also a few other things in terms of minor details that need to be checked with regards to graphics cards. First all, it may be worth paying attention to the amount of RAM that dedicated cards are getting, which at the moment is peaking at around 1GB. There are also some weird things in terms of DirectX, especially at medium level cards. The prime example is that, on the spec sheet, the NVIDIA 330M and the ATI Radeon Mobility 5650 both look very similar, but the 330M is only a DirectX 10 card compared to the 5650 being a DX 11, which will give greater performance and be utilised better by more modern games. Don’t be confused by cards that say “565v”, they are not simply a mis-type of the 5650, they are different cards, more comparable to the 4000 series.
It’s clearly a very confusing world, but if you are planning on doing anything more than light (very light) gaming, then a dedicated card is a good choice. Whilst you may not necessarily need a gaming dedicated machine, a decent dedicated card will give you far more options what you can do with your laptop. Many laptops, starting at around £600, come with dedicated cards, even a lower end model will help keep your machine more up to date than any integrated chip.
However, there is a problem when we start talking about graphics, that is battery life. Running a component such as that really sucks away battery life, and whilst most desktop replacements that have these cards are plugged into the mains most of the time, some of you will want to have a bit more portability. This is where “switch-able graphics” come into play. Sometimes this is automatic, the laptop automatically switching to the integrated chip when you are not doing much demanding, which will help battery life. There are some newer machines that have a button that allows you to choose which of the two graphics cards, one that favours battery, the other that has a bit more of a kick. These are very expensive, purely because of the battery life they can provide, which is a bonus to those people on the move. Of course, screen size and other components can contribute to a short battery life, don’t just blame the graphics!
If we haven't bored you, here is some more:
Josh Dean
Josh came to Game-Engine after running several other “web destinations” into the ground with constant re-designs and feature sets. After founding a website based about games, which again, suffered the fate of a perfectionist, yet poor, designer, Game Engine was created as a way to channel those energies in the direction of a poor, vunerable website. Afer co-founding Game Engine on a historic moment in intergalatic history, Josh turned his attention to web development yet again, muddled through it, and then started to “write” about what is probably his most normal interest, video games. Now Josh has expanded into poorly recorded screen captures and talking into cameras with painstaking conviction, as well as keeping up playing a lot of video games, then claiming that they are either ‘awesome’ or ‘rubbish’.
ATI has very lame Linux support