SXGA+/Radeon 9600 better for gaming? Or not....

[furball4]

I've been lurking around here for a few days now while preparing to purchase a new ThinkPad. I'm torn between an X31, T42 XGA, and a T42 SXGA+, but for now I only have one question to ask: would the SXGA+ machine really be any better for gaming?

On the face of it that seems like a silly question, since that machine has the Radeon 9600 64MB that blows the alternatives out of the water. However, unless you want to take a big quality hit by running at a non-native resolution, it also means that you have to drive your games at 1400x1050. That is a pretty high res for 3D games (from a performance perspective) and not really necessary. My gut instinct is that a 9600/64MB can probably drive games at SXGA+ at only about the same framerate that a 7500/32MB can drive the same game at XGA.

Opinions? Also note that I am not getting this machine primarily for gaming, and I know that if I want a gaming machine, the T-series is not the best way to get it. I just want to keep my options open and wonder if the XGA/SXGA+ decision is going to have any impact on my gaming abilities.

[pdudas]

I have SXGA+ and R9600.

The only problem is: 60hz refresh rate on LCD.
You cannot adjust this, and for this reason the thinkpad is unusable for FPS gaming. If you use external monitor you can play FPS.

Sxga+ has better viewing angle, so you dont have to set the LCD exactly paralell with your face (as the normal XGA thinkpads need), you will see it about any angle you want.

[Grinch]

What is the problem with 60Hz?
constant 60 fps should be enough for every human eye
and with vsync off you don't have any disadvantages because of any asynchronous game elements (it runs internally with some framerate but just displays max 60fps per second to the user)

[pdudas]

"What is the problem with 60Hz?
constant 60 fps should be enough for every human eye
and with vsync off you don't have any disadvantages because of any asynchronous game elements (it runs internally with some framerate but just displays max 60fps per second to the user)"

I dont think so!

I play Tactical Ops on my desktop with 1280x1024@120hz.

On FPS gaming necessary the higher pfame per secundum, because the fast motions.

[darrenf]

I play at <60fps all the time. I just played through HL2 at about 50fps. I don't like to start flames but I'll reply to one. To say that it is "unplayable" is just ignorant. [From re-reading your message, pdudas, I would guess that English is not your native language. Because of that, your comments may have come accross as more harsh than you intended.]

furball4, you're right that running at non-native resolution decreases quality, but only a little. While the image will be "softer" than with native resolution, all pixels are represented -- there's no lost screen information.

I play at 1024x768 stretched to full-screen (with VS on) and love it. Far-Cry, Doom3 and HL2 are all playable with all or most of the settings on high. I have also played at 1024x768 in a window, not because of the native resolution issue but because at full-screen my color profile is not used. This gives me the sharpness of native resolution and lets me keep an eye on my e-mail . Of course, I prefer full-screen.

I had a T41 with 7500/32M at 1024x768 and now have a T42 with 9600/64M. Far-Cry was difficult to run on the older machine (in fact I think it "requires" 64M) and I would guess that the newer games would be as well. The 9600 is DirectX 9 compatable which makes a quality difference in HL2 and perhaps the others.

A ThinkPad with 1024x768 and the RM9600/64M would be ideal. Since it doesn't exist, if you want to play recent games on a ThinkPad you will have to live with the image softness and go with the 9600 at 1400x1050. Or, as pdudas points out you can drive an external CRT monitor and run at any resolution you want.

Good luck in your purchase and report back to us on what you go with!

-darren

[furball4]

Thanks Darren, that was helpful information. Playing games in a window would take some getting used to, but it would be convenient in many ways too. Another question: what kind of battery life do you get? I know the SXGA+/9600 combo sucks a bit more juice.

[Kenn]

I play at <60fps all the time. I just played through HL2 at about 50fps. I don't like to start flames but I'll reply to one. To say that it is "unplayable" is just ignorant. [From re-reading your message, pdudas, I would guess that English is not your native language. Because of that, your comments may have come accross as more harsh than you intended.]
-darren

Well this is all getting into the realm of subjectivity. From your post it's clear that you have certain expectations and a certain threshold of what is acceptable. While I agree that "unplayable at 60Hz" tends to be an exaggeration for most people, it really depends on who's doing the talking. I used to play FPS games competitively, and when you take it that seriously against people who are REALLY good, the person playing 60Hz WILL lose 100% of the time if the players are equally skilled. Getting away from why someone like that would be playing competitively on a thinkpad, it's perfectly fair for him to legitimately say "60Hz is unplayable," and I know people who literally get sick and nauseous if they stare at a 60Hz CRT (different from the "refresh" of an LCD) for more than a few minutes. I'd be willing to accept someone calling that unplayable even if I thought it looked OK myself.

BTW, 60Hz and 60fps is incredibly slow as far as human perception is involved, and in a fast-motion application like an FPS, competitive players can easily tell the difference between 100Hz and 120Hz, or 120Hz and 200Hz assuming the framerates keep up (and on CRTs even from seeing a blank screen). Studies have shown that air force pilots can identify sillouettes of planes that are flashed for hundredthds or even thousandths of a second on-screen in front of them. Again, it all depends on who's doing the talking.

[darrenf]

It does draw a bit more power, but I found that the primary cause was the video driver. I now run the ATI drivers (v4.12 -- optimized for HL2) modified to run on the mobile Radeon (search for "patje" in google and it will be one of the first hits). The performance is much better than the IBM drivers (staggeringly better, IMHO) and yet the power consumption is the same. Other drivers I tried, like the Omega drivers or earlier modded ATI drivers, sucked a lot more power.

BTW: You can overclock the crap out of the 9600! I use ATI Tray Tool to automatically overclock when an application enters 3D mode and automatically throttle it down when I exit. It works *very* nicely.

Power consumption in-game is therefore crazy bad. This thing is throwing out heat all over the place while I'm playing, so I know that it would probably only last a couple hours. I always game on AC or during brief sessions on battery over lunch so I've not tried to optimize this.

Now when I'm not gaming and just reading static web pages with the brightness all the way down my TP is drawing about 10 or 11 watts. That gives me about 6 hours of use with the extended life battery (according to the Battery MaxiMiser Gauge -- I don't ever run it all the way down). When I had the T41 w/ MR7500/32M, I would get up to 8+ hours with the same battery, so I think it's fair to say that it draws 25% more power.

To be fair, I've found that I have to keep the FVU at a higher brightness level than I kept the XGA unit. That could be the smaller pixels (ergo more inter-pixel gap per sqare inch) or just the fact that everything is smaller. That will further reduce the effective battery life.

I would suggest that you put the extended life battery ($99 at newegg.com and other places) near the top of your wish list. I don't think I would be happy with the battery life of the standard battery.

If you think of any more questions, feel free to ask!

-darren

[darrenf]

-Kenn,

I completely agree except that the original post was "The only problem is: 60hz refresh rate on LCD. You cannot adjust this, and for this reason the thinkpad is unusable for FPS gaming."

pdudas was not saying that *he* found it unplayable. He said that the TP was unusable for FPS gaming. That is just false.

Again, I don't think English is a first language for him, so it's very likely that this is just a misunderstanding and that he meant that *he* found it unplayable.

I don't think this rises to the level of the "fatal flaw" post.

-darren

[pdudas]

Darrenf: English is not my native language, but I think my last post is not readable.

Thinkpad is unusable for FPS gaming, unless you use external monitor.
60Hz refresh rate is a joke. When you switch off the vsync, the LCD seems to a jumping movie. I play FPS in multiplayer mode, so the thinkpad with the built in LCD is totally unusable for the game.

I used to play on my shuttle Sb75G2, and an analog monitor. Not as little as my TP, but a lot more usable on a multiplayer game.

[Grinch]

Well, as English isn't my native language either I got some problems understanding what you want to say. What do you mean with "jumping movie"? Btw. movies have a framerate of 24-29.97 => less than half of a 60hz TFT. But I guess the main problem of the notebook screens is their high latency which might be a problem for "professional" gamers.
Once again, with enough power (let's say constantly >200fps) I would say, that you won't see any difference in a 60, 100, 200hz TFT (let's just say that those exist ). What you see is when the framerate drops for whatever reason and that is very often the reason why you say that "60fps are not playable". So if you turn off VSync and have internally a framerate of 200fps you would not see any difference to the 60fps displayed to you.
It's quite obvious, that your analog monitor is more usable than your TP as it has no 40ms latency in displaying the picture, but that is not caused by the 60hz.

[pdudas]

Jumping movie is when the card can compute 150 frame per second, but the LCD is only 60. When you switch on the vertical sync, it seems that all of the moving object is jumping. There is frames which is not displayed, so the moving objects is appearing on the left side of the screen, and after a short time appearingon the center of the screen. You cannot see the 90 frames. In this 90 frames ther can be some changes what you cannot see.

[darrenf]

pdudas,

The reason I use V-Sync is to avoid the "tearing" that I see without it. I play games in the 40-50fps range, so I haven't experienced the jumping you describe. Without V-Sync, the framebuffer is displayed at a different frequency (every 60th/sec) than it is being written to (40-50th/sec) so I see a visual "tearing" of the image.

The fps cost of V-Sync is not very high (3-5fps I would guess) and I find it much less distracting.

Please remember that FPS games are not all multi-player. While multi-player is a lot of fun, so is playing through HL2 single-player and I prefer the best looking image possible. I consider 40-50fps very playable if it lets me set the video settings to their maximum. Since I would be playing at that speed by choice (to get the image quality), having a 60Hz refresh cycle is a non-issue. Even on my desktop (9800Pro/128M no OC) I get about the same performance.

Now what I do find irritating is that laptops seem to always show 3D as washed-out and lacking the vivid color I get on a desktop, even on full brightness. To counter this I have sometimes used my 2D color profile (by playing in a window). My color profile was generated by a hardware color callibrator and the game looks much better that way. I can't find a way to adjust the color profile in 3-D while watching the results. That's irritating.

-darren

[Kenn]

pdudas was not saying that *he* found it unplayable. He said that the TP was unusable for FPS gaming. That is just false.

I don't think this rises to the level of the "fatal flaw" post.

-darren

Darren,

I agree with you that this is a bit of a silly thread to hammer on

But just for the record, in precise as well as colloquial usage, there's nothing wrong with his statement. Again, you're judging everyone else by your own subjective standard. If the OP cannot effectively perform smooth turns because of the ghosting, if he cannot see fast projectiles approaching because of the low refresh rate, and if he gets to sick to play more than a few minutes because of these effects, again I maintain that he is fully within his right to say "this laptop is unplayable."

Conversely, perhaps you'll grant that 5fps in any title is unplayable. But if I could somehow, with great effort and after numerous crashes, beat the game, would that make your statement "just false?" There's a key difference in what you claim with the "fatal flaw" post as well - that term has a very precise legal, engineering, and even common meaning. OTOH, the "playability" of a game is inherently subjective from game to game, genre to genre, and person to person, as I'm sure you've realized if you're a part of fps gaming communities.

Peace,
Kenn

[ehd]

can we get back to the original question... how do the games run in 1400x1050 mode on the 64mb radeon =P

[darrenf]

Kenn, I'm going to go ahead and let this rest. Anyone that games will now have enough information to decide whether gaming on an LCD is acceptable or not.

ehd, what questions do you still have? I will be happy to answer as well as I can.

-darren

[furball4]

Well I started this thread, and I have all the answers I wanted. Plus an unrelated argument as a bonus! I feel lucky.

[darrenf]

How did this thread get moved to hardware? Isn't it T-series specific?

-darren

[ehd]

oh my question was how games ran in 1400x1050 mode.. u guys all talked about reducing the resolution to play the games but didnt mention the actual quality of it on 1400x1050 =x