Are there any mobile video cards that can game on 1080p?

[fuzzybabybunny]

It's really hard for me to do any kind of work with anything less than a 1920x1080 screen, which makes it a bit difficult to game on. I really dislike running games on the non-native, fuzzy resolution.

Any mobile graphics cards that can play, say, Mass Effect on 1920x1080? Or am I basically looking at a big huge desktop replacement laptop?

 

[mnewsham]

I don't consider my laptop to be big and huge, but maybe it's just me, plays most games just fine at 1920x1080.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I don't consider my laptop to be big and huge, but maybe it's just me, plays most games just fine at 1920x1080.

I have the Radeon HD5650 and it definitely is NOT ok at 1920x1080...

 

[mnewsham]

The HD 6990m GPU (which I have) can run Metro 2033 at high settings (No DoF or AA) at 45FPS+ at 1920x1080. It can run Crysis at 1920x1080 at 50FPS. What more can you ask for in a notebook?

EDIT: for your specific game Mass Effect.

My laptop:
Intel Core i7 2630QM 2GHz
Radeon HD 6990M (715MHz), 2048MB (900MHz) GDDR5-VRAM, Catalyst 12.4
8192MB RAM
1920x1080

I can run Mass Effect 3 on ultra preset at 56FPS.

 

[Gikaseixas]

AMD 7970M
AMD 6990M
Nvidia GTX 675M
Nvidia GTX 580M

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

The HD 6990m GPU (which I have) can run Metro 2033 at high settings (No DoF or AA) at 45FPS+ at 1920x1080. It can run Crysis at 1920x1080 at 50FPS. What more can you ask for in a notebook?

EDIT: for your specific game Mass Effect.

My laptop:
Intel Core i7 2630QM 2GHz
Radeon HD 6990M (715MHz), 2048MB (900MHz) GDDR5-VRAM, Catalyst 12.4
8192MB RAM
1920x1080

I can run Mass Effect 3 on ultra preset at 56FPS.

Thanks. Which laptop is it?

 

[nardz84]

The 650m GT in the new HP dv6 I just got is doing quite nicely @ 1080p. I get 50+fps in Diablo 3 and around 30 in Battlefield 3.

 

[Meaker10]

570M/670M (same chip) can do very well if you bios flash it and clock it.

 

[mnewsham]

Thanks. Which laptop is it?

I have the Clevo P150HM it is no longer made anymore as it is about a year old. Look at Sager and XoticPC however.

Going with the HD7970m (the best mobile GPU currently available) is going to cost you $1,500+ however.

 

[dagamer34]

Unless you're willing to constantly poor money into the idea of a serious gaming laptop, it's not a good buy because whatever is high end now will be useless to play high end games 2 years from now.

Until we get external GPUs, build a cheap desktop instead.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Unless you're willing to constantly poor money into the idea of a serious gaming laptop, it's not a good buy because whatever is high end now will be useless to play high end games 2 years from now.

Until we get external GPUs, build a cheap desktop instead.

Disagree. This recent crop of GPUs are the first to ever be able to play any game comfortably at 1920x1080 on laptops. Up until now full 1080p gaming was a huge letdown on any laptop.

I'm still going to wait. The current crop of GPUs still requires a hefty-sized laptop and I don't feel like lugging around a $1500 7lb lappy. Once these can comfortably be dropped in a 15" laptop at ~5.5lb or lower with 1080p resolution and around the even $1000 mark, I'll buy.

The GT 650M doesn't give me enough headroom for comfort. 30 fps in Battlefield likely means that it's going to easily get outclassed in some next generation games. The new ATI HD 7970M doubles performance and sounds much more enticing. When the performance level of an HD 7970M can be put into a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark, I'll buy.

 

[Meaker10]

In the nicest possible way, you are being idiotic.

You would stuggle to build a core i7 desktop rig for that much with an HD7870.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

In the nicest possible way, you are being idiotic.

You would stuggle to build a core i7 desktop rig for that much with an HD7870.

Pro tip from a mod to a user: when you say "in the nicest possible way, you're being an idiot/an moron/a retard/a dumbass" you're not actually trying to be nice or softening the blow but rather instigating someone. Let's keep this forum respectable. I'm telling this to you in the nicest way possible, of course.

Try "I disagree, and here is why" next time.

When did I say that I wanted an HD 7970M in a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark?

I didn't.

I want the "performance level" of such a card on such a box at such a price, and I'm willing to wait. Perhaps it'll be possible in a year or two.

 

[Chapbass]

Disagree. This recent crop of GPUs are the first to ever be able to play any game comfortably at 1920x1080 on laptops. Up until now full 1080p gaming was a huge letdown on any laptop.

I'm still going to wait. The current crop of GPUs still requires a hefty-sized laptop and I don't feel like lugging around a $1500 7lb lappy. Once these can comfortably be dropped in a 15" laptop at ~5.5lb or lower with 1080p resolution and around the even $1000 mark, I'll buy.

The GT 650M doesn't give me enough headroom for comfort. 30 fps in Battlefield likely means that it's going to easily get outclassed in some next generation games. The new ATI HD 7970M doubles performance and sounds much more enticing. When the performance level of an HD 7970M can be put into a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark, I'll buy.

The main problem with you saying "When the performance level of an HD 7970M can be put into a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark, I'll buy." is that unfortunately games will get more complex by then as well...and at that point the 7970M (or an equivalent, cheaper card, whatever is out at the time) won't be able to play the new games you want to play at an acceptable frame right...even though the price will be right.

EDIT: This is especially true when the new generation of consoles comes out. Once that happens we're going to see another leap in software programming, and its going to take comparable hardware to run it.

Honestly, I feel dagamer34 is right. While I don't have a lot of experience in gaming laptops, fundamentally a gaming laptop will always struggle when talking "long term" simply because you can't upgrade anything. The future for gaming laptops really is in external cards. THAT, IMO, is why you should be looking to wait. Its starting to come around, with connectivity like thunderbolt which is actually enabling the possibility to push mass amounts of bandwidth through an external connection....now its really just up to the software boys to come up with a solution for it, and it will sell like hotcakes.

 

[Chapbass]

Didn't really see too many benchmarks on it, but Sager has a 15" 1080p lappy with the 670M for 1179...pretty close to what you need I think...

NP9130:

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=category_browse&selected_cat=8

edit: eh, 6.83 lbs, didn't see that.


Yep, wait for external IMO.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

The main problem with you saying "When the performance level of an HD 7970M can be put into a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark, I'll buy." is that unfortunately games will get more complex by then as well...and at that point the 7970M (or an equivalent, cheaper card, whatever is out at the time) won't be able to play the new games you want to play at an acceptable frame right...even though the price will be right.

EDIT: This is especially true when the new generation of consoles comes out. Once that happens we're going to see another leap in software programming, and its going to take comparable hardware to run it.

Honestly, I feel dagamer34 is right. While I don't have a lot of experience in gaming laptops, fundamentally a gaming laptop will always struggle when talking "long term" simply because you can't upgrade anything. The future for gaming laptops really is in external cards. THAT, IMO, is why you should be looking to wait. Its starting to come around, with connectivity like thunderbolt which is actually enabling the possibility to push mass amounts of bandwidth through an external connection....now its really just up to the software boys to come up with a solution for it, and it will sell like hotcakes.

I think it won't be that bad. This is the first time in a long time where I haven't really felt like complaining about hardware on a laptop. The mobile CPUs are blazing fast, good enough for my photo and video work. Still needs a bit for 3D work though. SSDs are the same as in the desktops - before 2.5" rotaries would always be slower. This would be the first time I've EVER been able to play 1080p games on a laptop with details on high. And as long as 1080p stays somewhat of a standard, I think we'll be ok. I don't expect laptops to get Retina displays for a while yet -we're still on that stupid 1366x768 resolution...

The only thing that I can think of to really tax current cards at a locked screen res of 1080p is larger textures, maybe draw distance, and more advanced lighting effects. But I honestly can't really tell the difference between, say, Crysis Very High and Ultimate or whatever the heck they call it. Both look great to me and I'm very happy where it's at.

I agree that the interface is very very important. Super high bandwidth interfaces for connecting... anything. Drives, external video cards, displays, etc. I'd like to see more of those in the future. My laptop's currently got PCI-E 1x or 4x which would bottleneck most any high end video card I choose to connect to it via the ViDock.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Didn't really see too many benchmarks on it, but Sager has a 15" 1080p lappy with the 670M for 1179...pretty close to what you need I think...

NP9130:

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=category_browse&selected_cat=8

edit: eh, 6.83 lbs, didn't see that.


Yep, wait for external IMO.

Yeah, still pretty chunky. Not something that you'd want to walk around with too much.

 

[Meaker10]

Pro tip from a mod to a user: when you say "in the nicest possible way, you're being an idiot/an moron/a retard/a dumbass" you're not actually trying to be nice or softening the blow but rather instigating someone. Let's keep this forum respectable. I'm telling this to you in the nicest way possible, of course.

Try "I disagree, and here is why" next time.

When did I say that I wanted an HD 7970M in a 5.5lb 15" 1080p lappy at the $1000 mark?

I didn't.

I want the "performance level" of such a card on such a box at such a price, and I'm willing to wait. Perhaps it'll be possible in a year or two.

New gen of consoles will likely mean performance requirements will spike again...

 

[N4n45h1]

New gen of consoles will likely mean performance requirements will spike again...

Does this mean my new (desktop) GTX670 will be quickly obsolete? =[

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

New gen of consoles will likely mean performance requirements will spike again...

The games are still being displayed on the same screens at the same resolution. The current gen of old consoles are so far behind current GPU technology that they would need to play catch-up, I would think.

 

[Chapbass]

The games are still being displayed on the same screens at the same resolution. The current gen of old consoles are so far behind current GPU technology that they would need to play catch-up, I would think.

I dunno man, Ps2 -> PS3 leapfrogged current PC tech (at the time) by a decent amount. throw in the fact that consoles can be heavily optimized, going to take a lot more PC processing power to get the same stuff done.

I definitely think theres going to be a jump when the new consoles come out. Think 2006 when xbox and ps3 were coming out and all the sudden there was new graphics cards like crazy, Conroe had just come out, the AMD x2 series was out, I felt like I was buying new tech every week.

Since the consoles are getting dated, weve seen everything stagnate a bit (there was a thread in the CPU forum about people not wanting to upgrade anymore cause they didnt see a need...a lot of people agreed). I wonder if that is going to change with the new consoles.

Sure, the display res isnt increasing from 480i to 1080p, but I wonder if the new gen will have things like physics, draw dist, etc. that come to light.


Hell, were still a ways off from the things that Pixar and co. is doing, so the tech is definitely there to draw better graphics.

 

[alyarb]

The Playstation 3 and 8800 GTX were released in the same month of the same year. I am having a hard time understanding how the playstation leapfrogged PCs.

Yes, the Cell was a powerful CPU on paper but really inflexible in practice. Of course console CPUs can operate in stricter environments than x86, but Cell/Xenon in no way leapfrogged x86 technology, and the Xenos/RSX GPUs were halfwitted inbreds of native PC technology.

Consoles are good for proving the principle that fine programming does more for performance than gobs of compute resources.

 

[Chapbass]

The Playstation 3 and 8800 GTX were released in the same month of the same year. I am having a hard time understanding how the playstation leapfrogged PCs.

Yes, the Cell was a powerful CPU on paper but really inflexible in practice. Of course console CPUs can operate in stricter environments than x86, but Cell/Xenon in no way leapfrogged x86 technology, and the Xenos/RSX GPUs were halfwitted inbreds of native PC technology.

Consoles are good for proving the principle that fine programming does more for performance than gobs of compute resources.

That last statement is exactly what I'm talking about. People program for consoles, end of story. And because of that is why we NEED more power than the consoles to do the same thing.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

That last statement is exactly what I'm talking about. People program for consoles, end of story. And because of that is why we NEED more power than the consoles to do the same thing.

I feel like console games need to be coded efficiently just so that they can sort of *catch up* to the quality of PC games because PC has so much more power to spare...

The Playstation 3 and 8800 GTX were released during the same time. I *really* don't think the 8800GTX would have had any problem running any game at max (even modern games nowadays) at just 720p (which is what the PS3 can run games at)... Basically, the 8800GTX is significantly more powerful than the PS3's graphics card.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Also note that for this generation of consoles many game are 720p at only ~30 fps, not the 60 fps we want from our PCs. Some games even drop down to "540p" (half 1080p) then upscale so they can hit that 30 fps.