ATI Mobility Radeon 9800: Notebooks Get Next Generation Graphics
by Derek Wilson on August 19, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
We have been very satisfied with our MR9800 experience. For quite a while, we have called for high performance graphics options to make their way into the mobile market for those who are willing to trade battery life and heat for added performance. Not everyone who wants mobility also needs long battery life. Notebooks are much more portable than SFF computers, and we finally have a notebook option that is a viable solution for the LAN party crowd.Additionally, pushing higher performance options requires companies to really think hard about power management. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if the market requires high performance mobile computing, companies will have to build a better mouse trap (or at least a lower power GPU) to grab design wins.
And performance isn't the only factor. The fact that we are seeing the level of compatibility and feature set of the desktop move into the mobile space faster than we've even seen new mid-range and budget parts make it into the market from everyone is very impressive.
We would definitely like to see this, or similar parts, make its way into more notebooks.
The only real complaint that we can levy against ATI is that their notebook drivers are still lagging the desktop. Now that we've seen the hardware catch up, we'd like to see the software follow suit. ATI's new driver every month scheme might not work well for the notebook market (and is arguably not the best thing in general), but pushing notebook vendors to issue quarterly releases that match ATI's desktop counterparts would be a welcome addition to the already incredible setup that ATI is gathering together.
To be fair, we haven't yet seen what NVIDIA is bringing to market on the mobile side. From what we are hearing, they are planning on pushing a lot of power out to the DTR market as well, which should make for very exciting competition. Right now, we'll have to leave the question hanging in the air, much as we left it after NVIDIA launched the 6800 Ultra. Will the competition be able to close the performance/feature set gap? Only time will tell.
Now that all our mobile dreams are coming true, we will have to shift our focus back to begging companies to start offering competitive, performance-oriented, integrated desktop graphics solutions.
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DerekWilson - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Thanks Dave, I've tweaked the conclusion a little to reflect this fact.As for the comparison systems, the only way to have a true and fair comparison would have been to grab an AGP version of the mr9800 and dropped it in our desktop system. Since we couldn't do that (or shove other GPUs in the notebook) we went with our standard graphics testbed.
This isn't a direct comparison, and we mentioned that we only used other ATI cards because of that fact. Numbers other than the MR9800 are just for reference.
DaveBaumann - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Derek,Its up to the notebook vendors to qualify the drivers, not ATI. ATI can supply the drivers to the vendors, but its up to the vendors to qualify and release them.
plewis00 - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
If the graphics drivers are lagging behind, can't you use a driver which works with all cards - like the Omega ones? The same driver works with the Mobility series and the desktop ones, would that help out? I don't think it disables Powerplay either.Does anyone know what the power drain of the laptop is during a heavy gaming session? Or how long it lasts on batteries?
devonz - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
I have to reiterate what #13 said. Why did you compare a P4 notebook against an Athlon 64 desktop!?!?!? And why the differing memory configurations!?!?!? Since you are comparing the video cards, it would SEEM like a good idea to get the configurations as close as possible. Certainly you could get closer to parity than THIS choice!My $.02
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
I agree, I keep my laptop graphics cards at stock, it's not worth overclocking for a small performance increase, especially when it is usually difficult to replace the graphics card.John
nserra - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
#14 Maybe Powerstrip will do, but not recommended....Besides overclock just to get from 200 to 220, 100 to 110, 50 to 55, 25 to 27 in some games.....
Just to say that when you already have a lot of fps you will get even more (not needed) and when you have low fps, you will continue to have low fps….
In very resuming words OVERCLOCK does not compensate.
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Usually it's just the same as overclocking a desktop graphics card although obviously you have far less headroom.John
skunkbuster - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
just out of curiosity, anyone know if it's possible to overclock a video card in a laptop?reboos - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
comparing a Athlon64 3200+ w/ 1 gig of RAM to a Northwood 3.2 with 2gb of RAM. I don't get it. :\Shalmanese - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
No Doom 3 benchmarks? :o :(