towards the optimal laptop

Mark Hachman talks at Extremetech about AMD’s Game! Initiative and some of the problems associated to PC gaming. He makes his proposal of a rating system to state what PC do you need to run what games, and what games you can run with your PC. The proposal is not bad, but I think most gamers would agree in that there is already a de facto standard for PC gaming benchmarks: 3DMark. But there are 2 steps lacking to use 3D Mark values as a true rating system for the PC gaming industry:

1. State the mark achieved in PCs and graphics cards.
2. State the mark needed to run the game in the “system requirements” area. Something like: 1500 for Basic experience, 3000 for Standard experience, 9000 for Extreme experience, or similar. Experience levels should be defined to match a given resolution and image quality.

Maybe a benchmark better than 3D Mark could be developed, but I think a benchmark-based aproach is the ideal. My laptop scores 360 in 3DMark 06 and that tells to any gamer that it’s not suitable for playing most games: I don’t have to say anything more about its specs. You get the idea.
Other approaches are possible: i.e., I’ve been wondering for a long time about the creation of a database joining graphics cards with frames per second achieved in games: if enough people contributed, it would be useful. The point is: to create an objective way to relate performance offered with performance needed, and use it in PCs and games. Does it seem so difficult?

Update: more info about the topic at Ars Technica, Digital Trends, Engadget, Gizmodo. I find specially interesting the article about AMD Game! at PC Perspective.

Related posts:

1. Mainstream PC gaming: GPU or CPU?
2. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 gaming benchmarks (Call of Duty 4, Crysis, World of Warcraft, F.E.A.R. 2, Sacred 2, Red Alert 3, Unreal Tournament 3, World in Conflict, GRID, Far Cry, Half Life 2)
3. PC games system requirements
4. Gaming on Laptops, the new site by Towards the optimal laptop
5. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3850 x2: the most powerful?

Tags: Gaming, graphics cards

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 19:27 and is filed under hardware, miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.