Did graphic performance stop evolving on laptops?

Im looking arround for a new laptop to replace my soon 3 year old Hp wich has a radeon 1600 graphics card. Sure the model names did go up but the performace is the same.
I was actualy surprised to find out that my 3 year old computer was alot faster than a few new computers I bought at work recently.

So where does this leave us when coding games? Apparently the people dont care about fast graphics any more in there laptops.

It means you don't have to compete with Epic et al within the laptop owning user-base, which is what we call 'A Good Thing'.


I think it just got to the point with the PC in general that the gfx chip was the only expensive thing left. A computer that does everything except bleeding-edge graphics can be picked up for peanuts; laptops with integrated gfx chips have become very affordable... is gaming worth the differential? Big ol' boring, seen-it-all-before-just-slightly-less-shiny PC gaming? Not really.

If you want high end graphics in a laptop expect to spend a lot of money.I have just got a fujitsu siemens and the 3d is rubbish even thought it has a 3d chip in it.

I feel like i have wasted my money.

You need one with a top notch graphics chip if you want to do anything serious Space_guy,happy spending.

yeah. alot of money seems to do the trick but still there is not much to chose from in the top. Hp makes a few machines but i really dont like that they twice as heavy. I drag my computer arround with me all the time but a computer that weighs less than 2 kilos and still have decent 3d is seemingly impossible for now.
I can adapt to code to lower specs i guess but I would really like to be able to play some new games too.

Do you have to play new games on your laptop? What about a beefy desktop and a netbook or summat?

There are several reasons for this:

1) Better/faster graphics cards draw more power
2) Better/faster graphics cards tend to run hotter
3) Lower end graphics adapters are cheaper
4) Lower end graphics adapters are 'good enough' for the majority of users, that use their laptops for office or school applications.

Keep in mind:

People don't want the extra power drain because it means a (significantly) shorter battery life, and the entire point of a laptop to most people is that it's portable and can be used in the middle of nowhere (on a train / plane /whereever)

The additional heat needs to go somewhere, which means that you'll either burn your fingers and/or lap when using the machine, or need to add a battery of fans which make the laptop prohibitively noisy which limits their use in things like corporate conference rooms.

The majority of laptop users aren't hard-core gamers, it's people that need a mobile computer to do work. Even if they do play the occasional game, there really aren't that many people lining up to play the top-of-the-line FPS games -- and these kind of laptops are still more than sufficient for the mass-market more casual games.

For the gamers there are gaming laptops, but be prepared to pay a LOT more for those thanks to the smaller demand and increased technical/design difficulties involved in creating such a machine in the first place.

If you want a 'real' computer, buy a computer and not a laptop.

Sorry Space_guy i miss understood.If you want to play up to date games on laptops not good.If you want to code in Blitz3D or BlitzMax,
it is an experiance.

Well I wont be playing games that much.
I just thought that there would be options for faster graphics cards if I wanted or needed them.
For example I browsed thrue the entire laptop line of sony and none of their computers exept possibly an 18 inch variant has any decent graphics beyond the laptop I have now. And its the same for many other brands.
Ofcourse I realise that people want a light weight fast for normal use
computer and I do too, and having a weaker graphics card really do help the battery life.

I noticed that a lot of laptops nowadays seemed to be getting shipped with broadband/dongles for free, and seem to be pants in the gaming department in AAA respect because they are all nearly Intel GMA based systems.

I know probably 7 people who have an intel GMA based laptop this side of the monitor, the most worrying thing is that 3 of them have Vaio's, which means when they have tried to upgrade their intel drivers, they are met with a message box stating that they must contact their systems vendor for the updates...

And going to the Vaio's website, which I've done myself, there are no offical intel GFX driver updates on there.

Which means OpenGL is nigh-on knackered.

Dabz

Who in their right mind would buy a laptop and expect to play cutting edge games on it (unless you spend a shedload of money)?

more than likely a contract dongle at that and perhaps with no choice in gb price plan (must look into upgrading mine from 3 to 7gb)

power/heat issues will always be there for high end gfx
remember a lap top is meant to be portable as its primary role, not just a smaller all in one box that takes up less space on your desk.

granted where i live laptop sales are on the increase as most people live, like i do, in bedsits and shared houses and space is a premium and everyone whos told me they were buying a lap top wernt buying it for portability but for its small foot print
but due to the power/heat issue, they will never be able to do things a (sometimes far) cheaper desktop could do and if one thing goes wrong, it all goes wrong
you cant get access to the hard drive to back it up before shipping it back and they send you a brand new box, well thats all your holiday snaps and mp3's gone the bye bye

The problem is that in real the gfx chips technology hasn't as much improved as the desktop market might make you believe because if you take a look at the insane power consumption, the large cooling devices and how big the cards became, that's nothing i would call a real advancement. As you can't cheat this way in laptops it gets more obvious how far they really progressed, still a lot but simply not this much. Nevertheless the latest mobile chips from both nVIDIA and ATI are more powerful than each iteration before.

One thing's for sure, graphics cards, motherboards and the number of memory slots in motherboards for desktop computers have increased over years. Such increases cannot easily be implemented in the limited size of laptops with mere chipsets.
Cooling is prime factor too, especially as the space within a laptop is aain so limited, that adequate airflow or cooling methods are even harder to implement.

It's always been the way, but of course, becomes increasingly more difficult.

Laptops have never been readily able to compete directly with their desktop counterparts, nor are they intended to.

The biggest advances in laptos are with HD size, with newer drives being much thinner and arrays allowing for much greater capacity.

However, there are plenty of laptops able to play high spec. games, only these are, as stated above, priced at 3 or 4 times rgeater than the general standard latest laptops.

If there was a market for cheap gaming laptops, someone would fill it. People don't play games on their laptops much. Not serious ones, anyway. Gaming on a laptop is a pain in the ass unless you plug a mouse in, which means you've then got the laptop on a desk or a table and you have to find a mousemat....

Unless you get a desktop replacement laptop (and thus, you have an external monitor, keyboard and mouse ready to plug in when it's tethered to AC power), there's not going to be a lot of need for graphical performance. Niche market.

I've got a gaming laptop and it did indeed cost a pretty penny. It's constantly tethered to AC power and it spends half of its life pretending to be a small desktop PC. Right now, it's at the foot of my bed hooked up to a 24" monitor on the wall and a USB keyboard and mouse. It has SLI graphics cards. The power requirements of such a system are such that if I disconnect AC power, the graphics cards are forcibly underclocked by a very large amount in order to prevent overloading the battery.

Gaming and laptops - it's a challenge. People care more about CPU and HD performance (on laptops) than anything else. It's all about boot times and the responsiveness of Facebook.

Check out the latest Apple `mac books` and `mac book pro`s, they have those new fancy nvidia chips - played with one on Saturday at an Apple store, they are quite quick, supposedly about 3.6 billion texels/second and upwards, up to 5 times faster than intel integrated chipsets?

I think the new trend for speed on laptops is going to be having multiple GPUs. The latest MacBook Pros do it (as well as a more recent Sony laptop I believe) where there's two physical GPUs, where one's meant for typical application processing, and the other for 3d-intensitive applications, and you switch which card you need on for whatever purpose.
(the Sony one being a physical switch you flick, and the Mac requiring you to relog-on)

The new MacBook line is pretty powerful, probably one of the cheaper 'higher' end laptops (even though it is just Apple's more budget line {as far as Macs go} laptop) with their 9400m GT installed, where-as the Pro sports both that, and a 9600m GT (512mb ram iirc).

A few years ago, CPUs reached the point where they had more than enough performance for everything an average user is ever going to need. And I think video playback marks the top here for most people.

There has also been a shift in the behavior of the average gamer: The current generation game consoles provide so much graphics and computing power even for high-end games that it simply does not make any economic sense anymore to invest into a gaming PC.

Besides, unless we are talking about stuff like Crysis, even three year old mobile graphics card like the ATI X1600 provide enough bang for most games.

Another interesting aspect are things like OpenCL, that clearly demonstrate that today's software is not even taking full advantage of the hardware that we already have. In some areas it seems that the software is no longer keeping up with the hardware.

But what's more important than graphics and computing power today are mobility, power consumption, affordability - and design.

My Lenovo Thinkpad T61p has a nVidia FX570M, which is not much worse than my 8800 GTS, and it's for sure much better then the 8600M on my Asus G2X laptop. However, the new Lenovo models seem to have no nVidia cards anymore, so I guess that's the end of Lenovo for me. The only choice for an upgrade seems to be Alienware m17x with dual SLI 9800GTX.

The thing about laptops is loads have them but have no idea what gfx are in them mine has a S3 Unichrome Pro (god knows what thats capable of lol) but it runs 3d with Max/Minib3d.

I use my laptop to test my games on, if it works on that then it will work on anything.

The new S3 chips are actually quite nice, then have even full OpenGL 3.0 support. Not the fastest chips on the planet, but it runs :)