What sort of performance should I expect now and in the future

[Hekko]

[Edit: added my complete system specs further down]

Hello I recently purchased a laptop with the 6870M card, and I've been experiencing worse performance than I expected from it, in regard of NTW/ETW I have come to understand that the issue is with drivers but other games have been performing worse aswell.

Compared to my 2,5 year old GTX 260 it feels like some games are running less smoothly, so I'd want to ask wheter or not the GTX 260 actually is a more powerfull card or if it's just the age of the games coupled with poor drivers.

[Jaketh]

Mobile anything will get raped by desktop anything, unless the desktop card is ancient, the GTX260 was a badass mid range card

[Hekko]

Oh, well this revelation makes me feel abit dissappointed Because CPU and memory wise the laptop was a big upgrade.

[Totalheadache]

Well i think Jaketh is overexagerating somewhat. A 6870 laptop gpu is more or less a 6870 albeit toned down.

This still should beat a 260 hands down. So yeah changing drivers might help.

You find some in here plus some other progs like radeon pro for ati cards..

http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=46

I ran ati cards awhile back but had xfire issues and now I always clean out my old drivers when installing newer/older/beta/quadro ones with driver sweeper (have a 580).

Perhaps someone with an ati card can give you the right procedure to follow. I think its a case of uninstalling via the ati driver, rebooting and installing another one.

P.S Gaming on a desktop is a lot better but hey maybe next time you will get/build yourself a desktop.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

Heres a quick guide for clean driver installs

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=52502

the 6870M is actually only 800 shaders vs the 1120 of the desktop gpu

that this means is the 6870 mobile gpu is around 5750 / 5770 somewhere in between the two on a comparison to desktop performance to break it down

6870m = 5870m just tweaked for better power thermals and slightly better dx11 performance

6870m is roughly equivalent to 5750/5770 desktop performance 5750 = 4850 in terms of DX9/10 the 5770 = 4870 desktop performance in DX9/10.

for those knowledgeable in graphics cards this means

since your GTX 260 is DX9/10 the equivalent AMD desktop gpu would be a 4870, the 6870m is roughly = to 4870 gpu in a desktop card when comparing DX10 performance this means that GTX 260 has the edge due to larger memory bandwidth, better support of desktop gpus vs mobile gpus, in essence your performance should be on par

and i dont care WHAT laptop you have the CPU might have more cores but laptops have much slower cpus in terms of clock speeds, cache, ram has far higher latencies and the HDDs in laptops tend to be far slower as well

what this means is your desktop CPU might be ancient vs the laptops but it most likely has higher clock speed which is something games tend to enjoy since very few games are decently multi threaded, or scale well across CPU cores,

this means even that fancy i7 laptop cpu at a whole 2.0ghz can easily lose in games to say a 3ghz Core 2 Duo depending on the title.

now before ppl go why are AMD / ATi gpus down sized from desktop to Laptop, Nvidia does this as well, its common market practice because no laptop can feed 300w gpus, its also why gaming laptops tend to be asinine, because there not really mobile your still tied to an outlet for power to actually game, so if your trying to run games off the battery in the Laptop thats also going to cause performance drop, because the battery isnt really suitable to feed a GPU.

easiest way for me to explain this

desktop 5770 = 800 shaders 128bit memory bus with 1gig GDDR5
mobile 6870 = 800 shaders 128bit memory bus with 1gig DDR3 GDDR3 and GDDR5 (depends on brand config etc etc this greatly impacts performance

5770 3dmark 06 score = 17500
6870m 3dmark 06 score = 14500
GTX 260 3dmark 06 score =17600

now lets look at 3dmark 06 scores for gpus in the same range

Desktop
Nvidia
8800GTS 512, 9800GTX, 9800GTX+, GTS 250 now yes all those gpus just listed are the same but thats a different issue
Ati / AMD
4770, 4830, 4850

the above gpus all score within 1000 points of the 6870m, as you can see even with the highest end GPUs on the mobile front your really still only getting performance comparable to a mid range Desktop gaming rig.

[Hekko]

Okay, thanks

The reason why I chose a laptop was that I as a student move about abit and thus need to have a computer that I can have with me when flying back home. And since the summer holiday is 3 months long I wouldn't want to be without my gaming PC that long, thus the laptop had to be my gaming PC. Before when I didn't have this need a laptop gaming PC was out of the question for me.

[Bolkonsky]

Always count mobile a couple of generations behind. Fortunately, small laptop resolutions generally make up the difference. My MR 5650 can play Bad Company 2 on highest settings, but it won't compare to my 450 GTS at desktop res.

Also a 3.0 ghz CPU is a 3.0 ghz CPU no matter what. The speeds will be exactly the same. It's not about laptops vs desktops when it comes to a CPU. If a 2.0 ghz CPU loses to a Dual Core at 3.0 ghz, it's because the software's probably optimized for 2 cores, as is often the case. Therefore, the faster core wins. It'll be the same in a desktop as well. The reason that laptops have slower clock speeds generally has to do with things like heat, pricing, and the fact that they're trying to push quad threading in software.

[craziii]

isn't 260m just a rebranded old nvidia mobile gpu? go with ati with this one.

is the notebookcheck website reliable?

[Jaketh]

isn't 260m just a rebranded old nvidia mobile gpu? go with ati with this one.

GTX260 desktop is what hes talking about

[craziii]

GTX260 desktop is what hes talking about

ahh, thanks for clearing it up for me.

[rtcreator]

I have the GTX260 (newer version) and it plays all games so far on high settings, so no problems at all.

[Hekko]

Well I'll bring this up again seeing that I'd like to know about the computer as whole this time rather than just the GPU, so the specs are following:

Processor : Intel Core i7 Processor 2720QM (2.20Ghz, 6MB, 4C)
Memory : 8192MB (2x4096) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive: 320GB (7,200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
Power Supply : Alienware 240W AC Adapter
Graphics : 1GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 6870M w/ PowerXpress
Operating System : English Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)
Display : 17.3in WideHD+ (1600 x 900) WLED LCD

So what sort of performance should I be getting from games and how long would this rig last for me?