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Laptop GPU Crash Course Please!

S

Sob Rogue

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 4, 2007
Messages
165
My gaming days are long behind me, and I have not kept up with the changes since. I might be dating myself, but last time I was looking into GPU's Geforce4 was the latest and greatest, and Max Pain and Blood Rayne were to games to be playing....

Anyway, I've been looking into laptops and have been getting headachs looking at all the differant versions of GPU's. I can't differantiat between any of them, as there are so many...like Nvidia 310,330,350,450... or ATI 4300,4350,5400.... (I just made these numbers up to make a point). I have a need for a high middle line, or low high end card to run a particular rendering software.

Could someone give a crash course on laptop GPUs, something so I can get an idea of whats what, and make sense of all the numbers, and versions out there?

It can be as simple as
Low End: Nvidia ...... or ATI...... Best used for flash or movies, games too much...
Middle End: Nvidia..... or ATI..... Best used for low end games, low resolution only...
etc...

*I've done a few searches, but all the results that I've found here and on the web dump so much info and charts in there comparison it makes my head spin, I don't even know what half the numbers there comparing are...I just want simple comparison like I listed above.*


Thanks.
 
easiest way, is to find the specs for the onboard graphics..

for example lets say the ATI HD5870m, while it has the 5870 name its not really a 5870. the 5870m has a core/shader clock of 700mhz. it has 800 Stream processors(shaders), with a memory clock of 1000mhz. so now if you compare that to say a dedicated desktop graphic card you would be looking at an underclocked HD5770 which would put it roughly in the same performance window as the 5750 due to the lower clocks.

insanely confusing due to the stupid naming used on mobile gpu's but both companies do this. the spec's will tell you everything about the performance since you can look at the desktop variant running those same specs then look up reviews on those specific cards so you have a rough idea of what to expect with the mobile version. to say whats low end and whats high end is hard to say exactly. since people's preferences are different. but basically anything that doesn't use dedicated memory is always on the low end. so if you want something that can game it needs to have a minimum of 256mb of dedicated memory. it can use a mixture of dedicated and shared memory but at least 256mb of it needs to be dedicated.
 
Even onboard chips today have no issues playing 1080p content. If you aren't gaming, don't worry about the graphics solution, worry about the speed of the cpu and amount/speed of the ram.
 
goto notebookcheck's benchmark list

it does a good job of classifying the gpus old and new.. for example a New AT 6200 may be slower than even an ATI Mobile 4870..
 
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