Laptop recommendations?
by Jason Mahar · in General Discussion · 03/25/2006 (12:27 pm) · 8 replies
I'm an independent developer (read: not a lot of money) that is going to need a laptop for interview/demo purposes of the Torque stuff I'm been working on. I tried using the Torque Warzone demo on my roommates laptop and it has bad frame rate and a bunch of graphics problems (even after we patched its video drivers.) I looked on the forums and see that a bunch of other people have had laptop issues, so I'm wondering if you guys could recommend ones to buy under $1500 (and preferably under $1000) that would be capable of handling the Warzone demo and TSE. I'm assuming video capability is the main problem, so maybe we could build a list of which video cards/drivers TSE does or does not work on?
thanks for any advice,
jason
thanks for any advice,
jason
#2
03/25/2006 (6:39 pm)
Hey, I'm one of thsoe folks with laptop troubles. I bought my laptop about 2 years ago. and It has already become out dated. I still love my laptop, but it isn't that great for the latest games. The thing is with laptops its hard to upgrade your video card. If I were you I would get a Desktop that way you can upgrade it as new hardware comes out.
#3
03/25/2006 (9:16 pm)
Yeah I know what you're saying Ben. I'm definitely of the opinion that it's better to have 2 desktops than 1 nice laptop, but I don't think it would look good to drag a whole desktop into an interview. I've also come to the conclusion that there's too many distractions for me to work well at home. So until I'm hired by a company with an office, being able to carry my computer to a coffee shop to work is a big advantage.
#4
It's an IBM T41 with 1.6GHz Pentium M, 1G RAM, 1400x1050 res monitor and a Radeon 9000 GPU with 32M ram, which I thought was too lame for games ... I was wrong.
I was mighty impressed by all the TGE stuff, on that wave I threw Halo1 and Quake3 at it, they ran just fine as well. Ok let's try Doom3, hmm only 17fps - which is clunky but it did work.
This is mainly at 680x480 low which is on par with xbox and ps2, don't expect high quality 1600x1200.
Yes there are limits and they can be reached but my laptop does run enough to suit my purpose, which is development. Of course for playing the latest and greatest at high res you need more beef.
DO NOT take my word for it and this is not a recommendation. Try before you buy ;-) but all I'm saying is hey not all laptops are completely useless for games.
Cheers
-Alex
03/27/2006 (2:16 pm)
Dunno about TSE but I can speak for TGE. TGE demos, Warzone demo, the starer kits and demos like Mable all run just fine on my laptop.It's an IBM T41 with 1.6GHz Pentium M, 1G RAM, 1400x1050 res monitor and a Radeon 9000 GPU with 32M ram, which I thought was too lame for games ... I was wrong.
I was mighty impressed by all the TGE stuff, on that wave I threw Halo1 and Quake3 at it, they ran just fine as well. Ok let's try Doom3, hmm only 17fps - which is clunky but it did work.
This is mainly at 680x480 low which is on par with xbox and ps2, don't expect high quality 1600x1200.
Yes there are limits and they can be reached but my laptop does run enough to suit my purpose, which is development. Of course for playing the latest and greatest at high res you need more beef.
DO NOT take my word for it and this is not a recommendation. Try before you buy ;-) but all I'm saying is hey not all laptops are completely useless for games.
Cheers
-Alex
#5
After doing a lot of looking around it looked like I could get a laptop that would run TSE for close to $1000 but CompUSA has the Acer on sale right now for $1300 (http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=336978&pfp=SEARCH) so I figured it was worth spending a couple hundred extra for something that would run about 5x faster/ look 5x better.
03/29/2006 (2:45 pm)
Thanks everyone for your feedback. For the record I ended up getting an Aspire 5672WLMi Notebook with a Radeon X1400 graphics card and the Warzone and TSE demos look beautiful on it. After doing a lot of looking around it looked like I could get a laptop that would run TSE for close to $1000 but CompUSA has the Acer on sale right now for $1300 (http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=336978&pfp=SEARCH) so I figured it was worth spending a couple hundred extra for something that would run about 5x faster/ look 5x better.
#6
03/29/2006 (3:38 pm)
That has shader 3.0 right? Have you tried to run Nalu demo on it just for grins?
#7
Has anyone else had luck running the Nalu demo on a high-end ATI card?
(demo: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_nalu_downloads.html)
03/29/2006 (4:30 pm)
It does have Shader Model 3.0. I just tried the Nalu demo on both my laptop and my desktop and they both give me a bunch of NV_ errors. My desktop has an ATI card as well, so I wonder if the demo can only be run with NVidia cards/drivers. Has anyone else had luck running the Nalu demo on a high-end ATI card?
(demo: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_nalu_downloads.html)
#8
Some people enjoy hacking the demos so they run on both, but out of the box, you wont be able to.
03/29/2006 (4:35 pm)
Fyi, it's pretty common knowlege that both ati and nvidia break their tech-demos so they dont run on the competitors product.Some people enjoy hacking the demos so they run on both, but out of the box, you wont be able to.
Torque Owner Vashner
I guess some of the mobile X300 or better should work too.
Under $1000.. now that's the tricky part...