Mobile Buyer's Guide

A Few Words about Graphics

We haven't dwelt much on the topic of gaming laptops so far, and with good reason. The less expensive notebooks that come with discrete graphics may try to pass themselves off as being game worthy, but the truth is most laptops that don't cost over $2000 aren't going to have sufficient graphics power to run a lot of modern 3D titles without seriously decreasing the detail settings. The "midrange" mobile graphics solutions like the HD 2600 and GeForce 8600M might at first glance seem reasonable, but they're more for multimedia and fall short of being true gaming solutions. You really need to get into the 8800M series to get relatively high mobile graphics performance. Let's dig a little deeper to find out why.

NVIDIA has a lot of overlapping product names that can create some confusion, so let's take a minute to go through them all. The GeForce 8600M GS is a 16 SP solution that will struggle with modern games at moderate resolutions (1280x800) unless you turn down some details; the 8400M GS and 8400M GT also have 16 SPs but with 66% and 75% of the clock speed of the 8600M GS. The GS also cuts the memory bus in half (64-bit), which further reduces performance. The 8400M G is the bottom of the discrete mobile solutions, with only 8 SPs and a 64-bit memory bus. Despite the similar name, the 8600M GT is about 50% faster (32 SPs), and the 8700M GT is a ~30% higher clocked version of the 8600M GT. Confused yet? We're not even half way through the list!

In recent months, NVIDIA launched their 9M series of mobile GPUs. While you might expect them to be newer and therefore faster, looking at the specs it seems as if many of the parts are merely renamed 8M solutions. The 9300M G has the same specs as the 8400M GS, the 9500M GS looks the same as the 8600M GT, and the 9650M GS is the same as the 8700M GT. Well, core clocks, shader clocks, and RAM clocks are all the same at least. It's not entirely clear right now, but some of the 9M parts may be manufactured on a 55nm process instead of a 65nm or 80nm process - NVIDIA hasn't really clarified this point. While the 9M parts at first glance seem like rebadged 8M chips, there is one difference: the 9M parts (well, at least some of them) also have the latest VP3 video processing engine compared to VP2 on the 8M chips. How much that matters will depend on how important you feel Blu-ray decode acceleration is.

Wrapping things up, we still have the highest performing NVIDIA solutions: the 8800M GTS and the 8800M GTX, with 64 and 96 SPs respectively plus a 256-bit memory interface. With two or three times the number of SPs as the next tier of NVIDIA chips, plus roughly twice the memory bandwidth, there's a huge performance gap. The 8800M GTS ends up being about 80% faster than the 8700M GT, and the 8800M GTX improves on that by another 30% or so. To put all this in perspective, the 8800M GTX is still about 20% slower than a single 8800 GT 512MB desktop. Now, while the 8800 GT was a great card when it launched, there are certainly a lot of titles where it struggles at higher detail settings and resolutions… which is why we now have $200 9800 GTX cards.

And if all this discussion of mobile NVIDIA GPUs isn't already enough to make your head spin, the 8800M series is about due for replacement by a 9800 class GPU. We don't have specifics on clock speeds or number of SPs, but there are plenty of early images on the web showing upcoming laptops with 9800M GTX or 9800M GTS graphics. It's a safe bet that both will be faster than current generation 8800M parts; we'll have to wait for additional details on process technology, power requirements, SPs, and clock speeds.

Update: It appears some information is already available on additional NVIDIA mobile chips, specifically we have the 9700M GT, 9700M GTS, 9800M GT, 9800M GTS, and 9800M GTX. I have added a third NVIDIA table listing these products, based on the information on the linked pages (which may go away shortly). These parts should fill in a the gap between the 9650M GS/8700M GT and the 8800M GTS.

ATI's side of the mobile graphics equation isn't quite as confusing, as we don't have as many overlapping parts. ATI mobile solutions are also not quite as prevalent these days for whatever reason. We still have the HD 2000 and HD 3000 series of cards, but we have not yet seen any notebooks with the top-end 3850/3870 solutions. That means that the best ATI gaming laptops end up falling short of the 8800M NVIDIA options.

To quickly summarize things, we've put together a couple tables. NVIDIA has so many options that we split their table into a lower and upper tier of performance. We have only included DirectX 10 capable parts, and we arranged the tables in order of roughly increasing performance. We also omitted the IGP solutions; the best of these is the ATI Radeon HD 3200 found in the 780G, but it only barely outpaces the bottom discrete solutions.

In terms of comparing ATI to NVIDIA, the desktop arena is a pretty good indication of the mobile landscape. The 3650 goes up against the 8600M/8700M and should be competitive with the 8600M GT and GS while losing to the 8700M; the 3450 will compete with the 8400M, and it's probably close enough to call it a draw - though performance will be around half of 3650/8600M. It's also worth noting that the HD 2600 and 3650 offer roughly the same performance, and likewise the 2400 and 3450 should be pretty similar. Like NVIDIA, the newer GPUs seem to primarily target better HD video decoding. If you want something better than an IGP solution, we'd recommend getting at least one of the 32 SP NVIDIA solutions or one of the 120 SP ATI solutions.