f13.net

In keeping up with Mechwarrior Online, I keep running across threads on their forum where people are either saying, "Is this laptop good enough to run the game?" or, "I just got this laptop, so I hope the game works on it."

Did nobody get the memo that laptops are crap for 3D rendering stuff?  Are people just trying to broil their thighs under two hundred degrees of agony?  Or has some magical device been released that can actually support fast-paced rendered graphics and I just didn't notice?

I'm sitting here next to my water-cooled i5 machine with the geforce 670 card in it, in front of a 27-inch screen, and I run across some games even with that system that I feel are a little too twitchy when lots of things are going on onscreen.  I can't imagine someone with a laptop being able to play some of these things smoothly without the graphics turned all the way down to stick figure level, and I can't imagine a laptop's interface not being crappier than a full-sized keyboard.

It's a mobile world.

In a 5-7 years I expect to see "Hey, is this phone powerful enough to run <big game>"

People are morons with technology. Almost every game forum on steam has some dicknose asking if the game can run on his laptop with less than a gig of RAM

Most people don't have a watercooled I5 rig. They can swing one computer and because they have to use it for school as well or don't have a permanent desk in the house, a laptop makes a lot more sense than a tower.

Personally I've been playing a bunch of games on my Macbook recently as my actual desktop is getting super-creaky.

My brother's PC is his work-issued laptop. He wouldn't even have a PC otherwise (Mac fan).

One guy in my WoW guild travels a lot for work, so he joins us in raids from his laptop pretty often.

Every gamer has different circumstances. Having a mortgage and/or car payment and/or kids can put a pinch on your budget. Staying at the cutting edge isn't possible for everyone.

The current generation laptops with i-series processors are going to have the same kind of graphics performance as the majority of desktop PCs bought by the general populace. Only people who specifically build a machine to play games or use a multi-monitor setup are going to use anything other than the built in graphics chip which has been moved to the processor die.

The entire discrete graphics business is now a niche market, not just the bleeding edge stuff. It is why nVidia is spending so much of their resources on pushing their products into HPC and creating mobile processors like the Tegra.

I'm a laptop gamer.  Sony Vaio.  Seems to do the job.  After a long day at my desk, I don't want to come home and spend four more hours at my home desk.  Plus I can sit on my comfy couch and watch TV.  Lastly, I no longer play twitch games and MMO's and strategy games do just fine on it.

So neener neener to your obvious laptop racism. Lapism? 

Because a lot of cheap laptops have been advertised as being "gaming laptops" when in reality they are about a third of the performance of an equivalently priced PC.

Though the serious gaming laptops that cost a fortune, must go through a battery in about 30 minutes and are way too heavy to be meaningfully mobile are also more wtf to me.

Laptops suck shit for gaming still but they're better than they were. Intel's integrated graphics are getting semi-usable, and new AMD laptops have APUs which have integrated 6000 series Radeons even on the cheap models which are actually pretty good.

The only things I can comfortably play on a laptop are turn based strategy type things.

Target specs for PC games have barely moved in years, which I think is largely responsible for the recent renaissance. Turns out targeting 90% of your potential audience is better than targeting 10%. Who knew?

That may change as we finish up this longer than usual console cycle.

I don't know how people game with 15'-17' displays, crappy sound, and mouseing on whatever the hell is handy.  Maybe browser games or those that require neither timing or precision.  More power to you if you can (or have to) make it work.  Way too many compromises for my liking.

The next generation PC/Console games, lots more GPU effects, increasing resolution (I'd love to play at 2600x1440 native on my monitor) will happily consume huge amounts of video performance. The consoles certainly have held things back though. Won't last. Also some games are actually boosting things for PC's and we now have an actual PC games market thanks to steam.

Of course you can get a lot of life out of an older machine by replacing the graphics card.... oh yeah, laptops.

I have one of the alienware M11 netbooks. It's tiny and not too heavy. It has an nvidia GPU(can't remember the chipset) that you can toggle on/off. It pretty much beasts any game I've put on it, but when the GPU is cranked up it will eat the battery in about 2 hours. With the GPU turned off and using the built-in chipset the battery will last as long as any laptop I've used in the past. I used it extensively while I was still in school, now only on extended trips.

Can't imagine being a full-time laptop gamer though. Home setup is one of those specially built, over-powered and expensive machines hooked up to a 55" flatscreen set up so I can recline on the couch. I enjoy it  :grin:

"Next generation" games could be made for PC today, but for the most part nobody is making them. It's a business decision as much as anything else. Yes, people will make engines that can scale up to take advantage of more power but I think the baseline is going to remain low. I mean, how many games do you see today with kinda shitty models and lighting where the dev says they learned from WoW and are going for style over raw tech? (Saying you are targeting low specs is also a nice way to save on production costs)

The PC games that have been leading the market for the past 10 years or more have been technologically pretty conservative. For a while PC gaming sales charts was literally all The Sims and WoW, with some Roller Coaster Tycoon sneaking in from time to time. Look at the leading PC game makers - Blizzard games are not particularly impressive technologically, the Source Engine is pretty antiquated in many respects. But an antiquated engine that runs on low spec hardware is now a virtue.

Sure, you can always just pump up the resolution and frame rate of a game with more power, and I'm sure that will happen, but I suspect min specs will continue to rise very slowly.

Since the new consoles are imminent and have to last for the better part of a decade there will be a sudden jump in demand matching their arrival. And that will translate directly into the PC versions.

The past 10 years of PC gaming have been about retail having no interest in it and choking the pipe. The reason WoW and Sims dominated is at least in part because that's all that was being stocked and those numbers are retail sales figures. Thankfully there is the possibility of an alternative now. Though I think part of the motivation is also that games are so damn expensive they need to cross all platforms to make back their money.

Many universities either issue or require laptops for their incoming freshmen.  It's what people either have or first comes to mind when they think "computer".

The same way we did in the '90s when a 17" display was a 'large' display, sonny!  :geezer:


Also a good point. Nobody's buying a PC and a Laptop for their kid, so laptop is now the default gaming rig for a lot of folks.

I want to revise my "phone" statement to "tablet."   I realized this as I was playing on the iPad last night.. which is even smaller than a 15" display.  :awesome_for_real:

I game on a latpop because it allows me to game in the same room as my wife when she's either using her computer (kitchen) or watching tv (bedroom or living room). 

Why would I want to seclude myself to the corner of the house just because I want to game?

I use a laptop because it was only about $500 more than a comparable PC when I bought it, and I can use it for school and on trips and the occasional LAN party.  My next computer will probably be a desktop, but the laptop works fine for almost everything out now, since modern games will run on just about anything put together in the last four years or so.  PC gaming is like 90% ports from consoles which are half a decade old, and most of the rest of it is indie or casual games which you can run on a slide rule, so I don't have much of an issue with anything.  The only release I've had problems with was Rage, which I can live without.

I actually like and kinda feel for those guys with the notebooks (or random crap OEM desktop) that are trying to play games on them.  GPU vendors and CPU makers have made it a complete pain in the ass for 'Joe Consumer that doesn't keep up with this crap' to know just what will and won't work on what, and the situation is even worse when it comes to mobile GPUs.  At least they're interested in PC gaming still, though I've noticed a big bump in PC gaming chatter even among console diehards as this console generation winds down.  Since the manufacturers of the hardware have made it a complete pain in the ass for noobs, they've gotta ask somewhere.

Target specs for pc games aren't moving much anymore because they're starting to bump up against a wall when it comes to making the chips smaller/faster. That's why there are so many multi-core processors, hell I've got an 8 core in my desktop. The clock speeds don't change much, and if they do you need a crazy cooling system to keep it from melting.

As far as consoles go, I hope the next generation of consoles fail horribly thereby leading to a pc gaming rennaisance. Tired of shitty console ports that were obviously designed for people that can't handle more than a dozen buttons. A mouse is far superior to thumbsticks any day. Maybe then we'll be able to buy games in a retail outlet instead of basically having to choose between Steam and..uh...Steam.

I have a bleeding edge desktop that I game on frequently, however I also have a $1200 dollar laptop that plays every single game that my bleeding edge desktop does. I find myself using the laptop more and more just because i can kick back on the couch and exist in the same space as my wife and my son and get my gaming fix at the same time. The seclusion that my desktop imposes using its fixed location is fitting into my lifestyle less and less.

Not likely.  Even if most consoles are played multiplayer via the internet vs. in the same living room these days, consoles at least give you that option. Plus they're worlds cheaper than a PC and require less maintenance.   I'm a PC fan but I understand it's going to be a niche market for the remainder of the time it garners any support.

Consumers want plug & play and appliance-levels of required support.  That's never going to change and PCs aren't that platform.  Consoles will be king until the next platform (which looks more and more likely to be mobile/ tablet) unseats them.

Yeah, I know it's unlikely to the point of never going to happen, but I can dream right. I've been building and gaming on PCs since I was 8 and it's sad that pc gaming will inevitably die. We'll all be reduced to dumbed down, lowest common denominator shit. Gaming on a touch screen tablet doesn't sound very appealing either.

Devs will make games that will sell. As long as there are people who want more complex or deeper game experiences, there will be companies producing it. The current AAA model will almost certainly die but it will be because the model is unsustainable and not because the platform won't support it. Gaming will evolve to match the hardware, I remember when mobile gaming was Snake and now there are retail quality games available on mobile platforms. There was a demand for it so developers built them.

Yea, this covers my case as well.  I use a reading desk to hold the laptop, and that seems to work very well to keep the heat away.  In terms of performance, my laptop runs D3 adequately.

My living room is mostly a big table with two PC's on it, hers and mine, facing each side. so I can look across the table from my PC and see my wife on hers. The PC has pretty much replaced everything else, we don't have a TV (she does have TV card in her PC, and a sofa behind) and most of the media we watch is streamed :)

The only reasons I stopped using gaming laptops was the cost (they're about twice the cost of an equivalent desktop at least), and the inability to piecemeal upgrade. But they're entirely functional.

What you see a lot of on forms are "can my shitty integrated graphics card run this", less than "can my laptop run this". Laptops rocking actual 3d cards instead of wonky pseudo supported shit are actually pretty common now. My work laptop does the integrated/nVidia alternate path thing when plugged in or running on battery and rocks 8G of RAM. I would see no issues with people owning one of those and expecting it to do everything for them (aside from play DVDs on an plane, good fucking luck with the battery life)

My desktop can always upgrade to a better video card if I find it wanting, but there's nothing wrong with trying to use a gaming laptop if you can afford it. There's just something wrong with trying to use a non gaming laptop for high end games (you will be miserable/have compatibility issues all over the place)

Nope. But mainly because retail is being squeezed (at least for video games) and the next console generation will see publishers go fully digital download ala Steam. Probably not day 1 of the new console launch, but over time, with simultaneous physical and digital launches.

Retail for products that are innately digital pretty obviously has a limited lifespan before it becomes not viable. Especially since the retailers dealing in second hand games has made them even more of an impediment than the cut they take out of the profits.

There's not really much differentiation in games retail either, the publishers call the shots pretty much.

I've been gaming on my portables for years. My current rig eats everything up, as did my last one. 2.7ghz i7, 16 gigs of RAM, 768gig SSD and a 1gig GT650M. Does it get hot? Fuck yeah it does, but it's not sitting on my lap and hasn't been since 2008.

And it probably cost you about 2-3 equivalently powerful desktops (trying to build an alienware machine with those specs comes out about 3k$). Which is cool if you've got the money, need a powerful portable rig or have limited space to put a desktop. But a lot of people don't have any of the three, get suckered by salesmen promising them the budget laptop is a "powerful" gaming machine and then complain when it's a dog.

That said the intel onboard graphics (I have a netbook) probably doesn't need to be quite as lame as it is.

I started mainly using laptops back in '01 or '02 so that I could game/work and watch my then infant daughter at the same time. My last really good machine is from '06 and I'm just now hitting the point where new games just won't run at all on it (Secret World). My work MacBook is picking up the slack somewhat (WoW, D3, Witcher) but I'm pretty much at the point where I've got everything I want and probably won't upgrade for a couple of years (unless something super duper comes out that I must have). I'm probably part of the growing majority that just likes having one machine that can do everything sorta kinda well and be portable rather than have one uber rig that is mind blowing but stationary.

The fact is most modern titles are CPU bound at most laptop's native panel resolution.  The GPU power isn't needed until you start connecting them to external displays that force more pixels.

Because why spend $3000 building my own uber machine every couple of years when I can buy a pretty uber laptop for $800 every year, plug it into my desktop peripherals and have much the same experience, and a warranty? And carry it around if necessary.

I don't think high-end desktop builds have been $3000 for at least a decade, especially if you're building your own.

Not to mention a top of the line $3000 PC built today would probably last you until the end of the next console generation, never mind a "couple of years".

Yeah you have to try really hard to spend $2k.

Australia. No, you don't.

Part prices have come down since the $AU hit parity with the $US, but for years we we overpaying for outdated tech.

Only if you buy from the main-stream retailers. The smaller specialist vendors aren't *too* much more expensive as all their stuff comes in a shipping crate from Taiwan anyway and they'll build a nice PC for you, it just won't have a big name brand.

a 3k desktop bought in that fashion (or home built), even at Australian prices, is a terrifying machine that will easily destroy any laptop remotely close to it in price. And with a video card upgrade at some point it can remain well above the curve for 5 years (as my current machine has done). Will easily handle the next generation of console ports too.

That said big monitors are still expensive last I looked. But once you have a big monitor laptops feel pretty claustrophobic.

Desktop multi-monitor set ups are pretty useful and I'll always prefer one because it's useful for work (Scrivener :heart:) and for sticking a sporting event on the rest of the time.

Still, a $500 laptop (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246328) can handle everything I play regularly on my desktop well enough, quietly, and can be go out and about if needed.  And depending what your TV/desk arrangement is, having an HDMI out makes it pretty easy to get at least some of that multi-monitor utility going.  Only downside is that you don't have room for a cheap SSD and a larger traditional HDD like you would in a desktop so that upgrade can be really pricey, at least in my case.

I'm not a fan of true desktop replacements though, unless money is no object and/or you have one of the narrow use-cases where they're actually pretty nice.

I've been rocking Diablo 3 on my work laptop (Dell E6420), turning down the graphics detail a bit. Heat was a serious issue (could play for around 30 minutes before it'd lock up) until I picked up a cheap 2-fan laptop cooling unit.

Perfectly reasonable to game on a laptop with a decent GPU and cooling. Sometimes at LAN parties, we'd hang the laptops out the window into the cold Michigan winter air with cables running inside for network, keyboard/mouse, monitor, etc. Good times.

I've spent the money on an Alienware laptop for my last two gaming machines because I need to be able to move it around the house if I actually want to get some PC gaming in. It costs me more, but otherwise I wouldn't be able to do much, as it's just not possible to lock myself away where ever the gaming PC would be. I've gotten the big 17" and 18" laptops, so to call them portable is a bit of a stretch and I never use them on battery power, but they are fairly easy to move around the house and when I do have some time, they're very easy to hook up to my home theatre and game that way. The screen size is fine when I'm just using the laptop, and with a decent pair of headphones, the sound is amazing and doesn't bother anyone around me.

Never had any heat issues, but my laptop also never is actually in my lap.

If your Core i5 rig with Geforce 670 craps out during high intensity 3d graphics your doing it wrong. Maybe if you feel the need to run the latest Crytek or Unreal engine title at insane resolutions with all the bells and whistles on but specs haven't moved that much in the last years that your rig should break into a sweat.

Especially from the time on when the 360 pretty much became the main target platform for devs and PC versions turned into "console versions with better graphics"

I exclusively play on laptops and have for the last 6 to 8 years. If you choose one with a dedicated graphics processor you usually don't run into trouble even with first person shooters.

You might not be able to max out all the detail settings and filter options in every game buts it's usually good enough if you're not 3d graphics obsessed.

There are a few things I like about laptops.

- Take up less space. A dedicated gaming rig takes up a lot of space, even a middle of the road type desktop does. You basically need a desk just for your computer, you need a big case, lots of wires dangle everywhere etc. Laptop on the other hand is smaller, takes up much less real estate, causes less clutter and you can put it away when you don't need it.

- Mobility: People tend to use computers a lot more today. Online shopping, facebook, surfing the web, communication. You're better able to do that on a laptop. You pick it up and take it to the living room to chat with people while your SO watches TV. You take it on vacation to save your pictures from your digital camera. You take it to the grandparents when they want to see pictures of your latest trip or the grandkids. You can't do that on a dedicated desktop that needs a dedicated space in your house and stays there.

- noise level: my second to last dedicated gaming rig sounded like a fighter jet and it cost serious dollars to make the last one as silent as possible (water cooling, big fans, noise reduction components etc. Less of an issue with well designed laptops or stock PCs.

- dual use work/home shool/home: others already mentioned it

- most households only have one computer that has to cover most of the bases well enough.

- no longer more expensive than PCs with similar specs.

- focus shift in gaming. Most people no longer demand the best graphics but focus on other aspects of games (for example "fun" but I'm being snarky here). Casual, console and social games have shown that you can have fun gaming without the need to buy a $300 rig. Smart Phones and the iPad are also big reason why graphics performance is less important.

Your argument would still be valid if you'd compare your rig with a $500 - $800 PC from a brick and mortar store. Most people, not even many dedicated PC gamers, spend $2000 to $3000 on a computer and laptops and desktops of similar specs and capabilities basically cost the same today. Even if the laptop is a little bit more expensive you still get all of the advantages from owning a portable computer.

The biggest issue with laptop gaming apart from choosing a dedicated graphics solution was HD access time and speed and that has become a none issue with the advent of SSDs.

The biggest reason for those questions is not one of performance. It's usually sufficient for 95% of all games if you don't compulsively max out all options.

They ask because support for laptops is still abysmal. It's more an issue of "does the game run at all".

driver support for laptop 3d chipsets can be pretty crappy depending on the vendor (NVidia I'm looking at you) and the chipset. Diablo 3 for example still doesn't run AT ALL on the latest laptop chips of NVidia.

And even if games do run you can run into issues because the drivers aren't maintained as well or lag behind the dedicated ones, sometimes by several versions.

Actually it's much easier to build a silent desktop PC. More air in the case and space let's you use larger fans at lower revolutions, passively cooled graphic cards (the main culprits) and better air-flows. My netbook has a noisier fan (and it can't run games) than my desktop which borders on silent. And even with the massive sales volume on laptops I'd still reckon a desktop has a sizable price / performance advantage.

Nor is my PC that large. Micro-atx has it at about the size of 2 shoe boxes and the cables mean I can arrange peripherals better. Have a real keyboard (buckling spring ftw!) in a good ergonomic position, real mouse, gamepad, huge monitor.

I still don't get SSD's. A real OS ram-cache's everything frequently accessed so they only matter for start-up time and a couple of seconds just doesn't phase me. Whereas 4-6 Tb of raw storage I do like. Of course this is partly because I don't switch my computer on and off that often.

Other than that, people can buy what they like and suits their use obviously, but the idea of living without a desktop chills me. I've got a claustrophobic, terrible inbuilt mouse and keyboard, netbook for portability (but nice form factor, weight and power use) but I'm so glad to get off it. And at work it pretty much needs a cabled keyboard, mouse, monitor and power to be practical so it takes up sizable space.

I use a mouse when I game, but I can't use another monitor yet because the 2880 by 1800 on the onboard display makes everything else kinda crappy by comparison. Of course, the windows drivers for my display suck right now too, so I'm kinda stuck either way at 1920 by 1200 when running 'doze.

I'm still building PCs for gaming, mostly because it's gotten so freakin' easy that I can spend less upgrading than I would on an annual laptop purchase.

At the same time, everything else I do is on my work MacBook running Win7 in VM (now and will forever hate all MS programs on the Mac side). I won't game on it, because I don't need to. I suppose in a pinch I could make it work, but I'll worry about that when I'm tired of the desktop experience.

The only advantage I see with a laptop is the battery for when power is lost, because I don't want to spend a couple hundred bucks on a new battery backup unit after the last one's battery acid ate through part of my hardwood floor :)

I didn't "get" SSDs until I played The Old Republic with someone who has it installed onto one. It usually takes me between 30 seconds and a minute to finish a planet's load screen on TOR. The SSD guy? Literally 2-3 seconds. He can also switch completely from one character to another in about five or ten seconds. It's crazy.

Having your OS and key applications (eg. browser) installed on an SSD makes a huge difference to it's responsiveness and daily operation. It's really, really not just about startup time. Everything is snappier, launching programs from the SSD feels almost instant, it makes a huge difference.

With a desktop PC you put the OS on the SSD and everything else on as much HDD storage as you want, which means you get the best of both worlds. With a laptop you have to choose - SSD or HDD. Personally, these days, I'd go with the SSD and use a NAS or cloud storage for anything that wouldn't fit on the SSD.

I also didn't really get SSDs until I used a machine with the OS on one. Now all my PCs are SSD based. Try using something like Photoshop installed on an SSD, it's just awesome.

Gimp (photoshop equivalent) 5 second launch, new browser ~2 seconds because it's ram cached... I wonder how much of the advantage of SSD comes from Windows being slow and stupid?

... but when I get my next computer I'll probably get one just because I like toys (and because I can have both SSD and 6Tb of disk).

From power button press to full load of the desktop averages nine seconds for me right now. That's the advantage.

Once you use a SSD machine, you do not want to ever go back.

Even my underpowered MBA (CPU wise) screams -- boots and swaps apps instantaneously.

My laptop has been great for the last three years. I find it much more useful than a desktop and it plays all the games I want to play.

So, my employer is planning to issue a bonus at the end of this month, and I find myself in the market for getting a laptop.  After debating the pros and cons of ultrabooks vs gaming vs generics, I think I've found a fair balance in this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=34-152-349

All the power and prestige of a gaming laptop, but not in a 17" monstrosity chassis.  Thoughts?

Looks okay. Sounds a bit flimsy but if you need haul it around it's probably worth the trade off.

I never used a laptop before this last move.  I couldn't really take my desktop with me like I did the first time I moved to Britain.  It almost all I had in my luggage back then.  But I was young and silly.  I got a out of box special on an Alienware laptop.  I hated it, too.  Small screen and heavy as hell!  I did, however, bring my PS3 for games.  I'm used to the laptop now and it runs everything.  I would still like a desktop with a decent sized monitor for gaming but this is what I have and I'm not willing to dole out another chunk of change for another computer.  Okay, I'm willing but I don't have any money.   :grin:

I've never had a mobile phone, either.   :awesome_for_real:  But since I moved, I've found places (like Tesco Grocery Delivery) that ask for your mobile number when you order.  If you leave it blank, it won't let you continue.  It does, however, give you an example of what a mobile phone number looks like.  I just cut and paste their example into the space.  What else can I do?

Been laptop gaming for the last 6 years.

I travel. Ergo, need laptop.

I have never had an issue running anything. I'm sure people used to have issues in 1995, but I have literally never had any compatibility issues whatsoever.

Always buy from a clevo reseller after my first horrid experience with an alienware machine. 15" or 17" depending on likely travel schedule.

Regarding hard drives. SSDs are awesome but expensive. Compromise I've found is a small SSD for the OS and a large Seagate hybrid for everything else (it uses a small amount of solid state to cache files).

One thing I do miss is the ritual of building a new desktop PC. But apart from cost that is the only downside I have experienced switching to laptop.

It's not gonna get hauled around that much.  If anything, 90% of the time it'll be in the living room so I can play on it while the Mrs. and I watch TV and such. 

Switch to Ocado.

ooo.  I will.  I didn't know about them but they have EVERYTHING.  They weren't around when I was here last.  At least not in Portsmouth.

They are a lot better with accurate estimates for delivery - plus they give the vans names (idk some people feel this is important).

Also waitrose supply most of the food, which is a good thing since Tesco has gone downhill quite dramatically since you were last over here.

I just canceled my order with Tesco and re-ordered mostly the same stuff with Ocado.  The bill went down 20 quid and I got another 20 off for my first order.  And they didn't make me lie about a mobile phone! Thanks!  That was awesome for real.

So not to be hijacking so much: 

The things I dislike about gaming on this laptop is mostly the small screen (14in. is not big enough!)  and no numeric keypad. 

We've got a bloke in our STO fleet who plays on a really shitty laptop. It's a nightmare. He can barely read chat, he's always the last to load into a zone, his mic picks up interference from.. well.. everything so you can't understand a word he says on Mumble and he regularly spends long stretches of time flying off into the distance because he can't see wtf is going on.

Mind you, I suspect he'd be a bit like that even if he was on a super uber whizzy gaming rig. Lovely guy, bit rubbish.

Wait, are you back in the UK ?

I am.  :)

You have my every sympathy.  It's shite here.