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Month: March 2007

The nVidia gForce 6150 mobile graphics card isn’t for Half-life 2

The nVidia gForce 6150 mobile graphics card isn’t for Half-life 2

Continuing my laptop performance review. I have a HP dv2000 laptop with a geForce 6150 and AMD Turino 2x I’m evaluating. It will play Quake 3 with a resolution of 1024×768 at a surprisingly great framerate, but not Half-life 2.

Half-life 2 stutters (or should say flat stops) for whole 2-5 seconds at a time even with almost everything turned off at 800×600 – definitely not playable in the outdoor scenes. However, you can turn things back up and get 30fps inside the buildings. It does play flash games very nicely at full-screen (Deanimator, Madness Interactive), has snappy UI in Vista, runs Photoshop CS2 without much effort, and (outside of Half-Life 2) would have been my laptop choice. However, there is a Core 2 Duo with a geForce 7100 for about $75 more, so I think I might go for that since graphics performance is theoretically x2 and the cpu’s are Intel. 🙂

Notebook graphics card benchmarks

Notebook graphics card benchmarks

So, I’m in the market for a nice low-end laptop but there are about a hundred different kinds of graphics cards in those laptops.   Even from the same vendor there are very cryptic model, performance, and feature specifications.

Question is: Which ones are actually good? It’s useful to know specs, but that doesn’t actually tell you how fast are they really (i.e benchmarks). Turns out, there is a great website that collected all this info in an easy to compare table. This has been needed for a long time:

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http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

 

GDC – but first San Francisco

GDC – but first San Francisco

I attended GDC (Game Developers Conference) this last week, so I’ve been down in sunny San Francisco.  Interesting city overall. For all it’s hippie goings on during the 60’s and 70’s it sure has turned into a very expensive and upscale place to hang out.  It’s certainly not for poor hippies now.

I’ll be putting more info up later about GDC but I went down a weekend early and got a chance to catch up with an old roommate and go to Comicon.  I met the guy that played the sith lord in the new Star Wars movies, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, the actress that played Kira in Deep Space 9 series, the original Apollo and Boomer from Battlestar Galactica, saw the cast and director from the new movie 300, got a drawing and autograph from the animator that designed Kim Possible, and attended the Chinese New Year festival in the Chinatown district.

Whew. Lots of adventures!