Hexus have thrown up their latest review of mobile graphics solutions from Nvidia and ATI! Here's a snip.
Alienware were kind enough to send two swappable cores with the sample: ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA's GeForce FX Go5700. Evaluating mobile graphics parts is slightly more involved than evaluating desktop hardware, due to imposed form factor limitations. For instance, taking into account power saving schemes available in each driver is prudent, but something never exposed or tested in a desktop accelerator. Driver issues also conspire to make testing mobile graphics a frustrating experience. Finding up to date WHQL'd drivers that support mobile GPUs is a painful task. More often than not you're reduced to downloading desktop drivers, running a tool that adds PCI ID strings into the driver .inf, allowing your mobile GPU to be detected. But it's common, when using that method of driver creation, that the resulting driver drops its power saving module, leaving you unable to test its effects.
Finally, with certain driver versions come certain application specific optimisations for certain benchmarks, making benchmarking them objectively very difficult. Image quality is the recipient, driver optimisations often lowering quality on a given benchmark for faster scores.
So this article is a quick shootout on a few synthetic tests and benchmarks, along with some UT2003 real world testing, to get a handle on one facet of mobile performance. A proper real world test with our usual game suite will hopefully come at a later date. This article is in the same vein as my recent 6800 Ultra preview, a technical analysis of sorts.
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 vs NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700
Alienware were kind enough to send two swappable cores with the sample: ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA's GeForce FX Go5700. Evaluating mobile graphics parts is slightly more involved than evaluating desktop hardware, due to imposed form factor limitations. For instance, taking into account power saving schemes available in each driver is prudent, but something never exposed or tested in a desktop accelerator. Driver issues also conspire to make testing mobile graphics a frustrating experience. Finding up to date WHQL'd drivers that support mobile GPUs is a painful task. More often than not you're reduced to downloading desktop drivers, running a tool that adds PCI ID strings into the driver .inf, allowing your mobile GPU to be detected. But it's common, when using that method of driver creation, that the resulting driver drops its power saving module, leaving you unable to test its effects.
Finally, with certain driver versions come certain application specific optimisations for certain benchmarks, making benchmarking them objectively very difficult. Image quality is the recipient, driver optimisations often lowering quality on a given benchmark for faster scores.
So this article is a quick shootout on a few synthetic tests and benchmarks, along with some UT2003 real world testing, to get a handle on one facet of mobile performance. A proper real world test with our usual game suite will hopefully come at a later date. This article is in the same vein as my recent 6800 Ultra preview, a technical analysis of sorts.
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 vs NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700
