Which laptop for XNA programming?

I'm getting into XNA 2.0 and I'm thinking of buying a laptop, primarily for programming and the usual web browsing etc.., but also playing older games (such as Flatout etc..), but I know nothing about how laptop CPUs and graphics compare to the desktop versions.

I want something that will compare OK with my desktop PC, which is a 1.6 Core2Duo with Radeon 1750. Also I want XP and not Vista. Maximum price is around the £400 mark.

This seems to be the most promising option:
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/asp/versions.asp?rewrite=Lenovo_3000_N200_Laptop_TY2EUUK__&pagetype=version&page=

It has a 2ghz Core2 Centrino and Intel GMA X3100 graphics.

Does anyone know whether this would fit what I want?

thanks
James

This will not work the least bit.

XNA is pure shader driven so you must at very least have a dedicated ATI / NVIDIA GPU.
Intels are out by definitions, they don't have hardware vertex transformation (the X3100 theoretically has but at 10FPS, you will not be able to use it, so skip it).

xna 2.0 works ok on my laptop, its a compaq presario f700.

While it's true that Intel graphics chips are inferior in most ways compared to NVIDIA/ATI, the later ones actually do work fairly well.

My laptop has a GeForce 9300m and an Intel GMA X3100 (switchable between the two), so I can directly compare. The X3100 definitely can handle vertex and pixel shaders above 10 FPS, in fact my planet renderer runs relatively well on it (20-30 FPS), and that's with vertex and pixel shaders handling dynamic lighting, etc. Of course, the 9300 is a lot faster, but the X3100 is adequate for a portable laptop.

The main advantage of Intel graphics is more battery life (and less heat production) - they have a much higher performance to energy consumption ratio, so even if an NVIDIA GPU is downclocked to the speed of an Intel GMA, it will still consume a lot more power. You can usually expect to get ~30% more battery life with Intel GMA graphics.

The advantage of NVIDIA/ATI, is of course performance, and better drivers. Intel chips are notoriously incompatible with many games, and I don't even know if OpenGL works on them.

John - do you know if your laptop would managed to run an XNA 2.0 program OK?

I don't expect blistering framerates out of the laptop, but it must support pixel shader 1.1 or preferably 2.0 for XNA stuff to at least work.

mtnhome3d: I've looked up the spec for your laptop and it seems to have an integrated graphics set - can you tell me how well you find XNA 2.0 to work with it? Do you have any problems?

Actually you can also make nice things on the Intel chips if you restrict yourself from the start and quite a lot of shaders work.

It will be interesting to see, which hw drives the gfx in the rumoured new macbooks which might be announced tomorrow.

On PC i personally would go with a Sony, i always made good experiences with their devices although Toshiba offers more bang for the buck.

This makes me really concerned over trying to use XNA for casual games. Maybe stay with Blitz for 2D casual stuff, then use XNA for 3D work with a view to xbox ports.

Yeah everything on screen in XNA is a shader - so b4 I knew this I spent 2 hours loading Visual C# and .Net and XNA and service packs etc only to be told my lappy was NOT up to it - :( sadness...

IPete2.

You mean to tell me that Microsoft are releasing software that encourages people to upgrade they're hardware? I.e. Upgrade to a shader capable 3D card to play a simple casual game written in XNA???
Shock horror!!! Next thing you knwo they'll make an operating system that does marginally more than XP but required five times the spec, oh hang on....

XNA is nice but not ready for casual pc games. Requirements are high and there's still issues with packaging the games ready to run on pc's without XNA installed.

I thought the issues with packaging were only with networking code, you just need .net 3.5 installed to play non-networked XNA games.

Yeah, it seems to run XNA 2.0 fine - at least the SpaceWar demo works fine. I didn't try anything much more intensive though.


Well I've run pixel and vertex shader 2.0 on it, so it should work.

However I've noticed that Intel GMA graphics actually seem to crash often when running some of my Ogre projects (when using GeForce doesn't), since the Ogre engine follows DirectX/OpenGL standard and I remember reading that the Intel GMA drivers have some quirks that need to be worked around. I don't know if this applies to XNA, but it's something to consider.

OK, thanks very much. I might be better off looking for a slightly lower-spec CPU but with a proper graphics card.

What about this?

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/range.html?t=nb&c=all&r=X15

It's £410, but it seems to have the same CPU, ram, hard drive space, etc as your original choice, only with an Nvidia GPU instead of the Intel.

Could someone with that card download the TorqueX 2 demo and test it?
Tahts the performance you can expect with an XNA2 3D game due to shader driven skinned animations etc

I have a Zepto 6625WD which is my main development PC. It's ultra capable, not too expensive, and unlike most laptop manufacturers they constantly update drivers for graphics cards etc. http://www.zepto.com/Shop/Notebook.aspx?notebookid=636

Didn't see the £400 limit until now :)

good link Gabriel :)

Hmm, honestly I think I'm going to be wasting my money - £400 just doesn't seem to be enough to get a laptop that will do XNA stuff acceptably - it will be right on the limit and I think I'll soon get sick of the poor framerates and go back to my desktop PC.

I think I'm better off spending about £200 on a new graphics cards and some more ram...that way I'll see a speed benefit in newer games also.

get an nvidia 260gtx...good cards

I'm sick of NVidia cards - I've had a fair mix of ATI and NVidia cards in the past and always had problems with the NVidia ones - the last one just died completely - and I'm sick of driver updates that reset your screen res and reposition all the icons and graphical glitches such as invisible plants in Far Cry.

The ATI cards have always behaved perfectly.

I like ATI/AMD as long as it stays on DirectX (Windows). For OpenGL nVIDIA is the better choice. I still like my GeForce3. Very nice card for it's time, also Doom3 runs well on it. :O)