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By Vince Freeman March 15, 2003 Do You Really Need a DirectX 9 Notebook?The mobile sector is one of the most lucrative and fast-growing PC markets. Today's lifestyle demands flexibility and portability, and the option of taking a notebook PC from the boardroom to the home, or even to the local coffee shop and WiFi hotspot, is an attractive one. Another rapidly emerging trend is that of replacing conventional desktops with powerful notebooks (including big-screened, desktop-CPU-based "desknotes"). This is really catching on with both corporate and home users. This new order creates additional demands on notebook hardware, as using a laptop as a home multimedia PC is more demanding than simply typing Word documents and checking e-mail. Intel and AMD have laid the groundwork with their high-end portable processor releases, but the video-editing and 3D-game-worthy graphics side has been sorely lacking. This week, ATI and Nvidia both announced new mobile graphics lines that look to cure this Achilles' heel and usher in a new age of mobile graphics performance. Notebook High-End = Desktop MidrangeAt the top of the laptop graphics scale, both companies are offering solutions that bear a striking resemblance to their desktop counterparts. Don't worry, there won't be a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra whirring around in your notebook, but the power level of this next-generation technology is still impressive -- on par with what the vendors call "performance mainstream" (one step down from cost-no-object game geeks') desktop architecture. ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 and 9600 Pro are AGP 8X, DirectX 9-compliant graphics accelerators that have the same features as their same-model-numbered, as-yet-unreleased desktop cousins, though clock speeds will be slightly lower. Until we actually see both desktop and mobile parts it's still conjecture, but ATI has said that the Radeon 9600 Pro engine could hit 400MHz while Mobility Radeon 9600 parts would likely be in the 300MHz to 350MHz range. ATI is offering different chip configurations for the Mobility Radeon 9600, including a discrete model plus higher-end versions with 32MB, 64MB, or 128MB of on-die memory. This isn't your run-of-the-mill DDR, either, as these chips feature high-speed GDDR2-M. The latter is is a proprietary memory format (partially designed by ATI), and while not truly DDR-II, it does offer higher-than-DDR clock speeds while maintaining low power requirements. For its part, Nvidia has introduced a high-end mobile solution in the GeForce FX Go5600. This, too, is an AGP 8X, DirectX 9 part -- and while ATI hedges a bit on clock speeds, both the desktop and mobile GeForce FX 5600 parts carry equivalent 350MHz core and 700MHz DDR memory speeds. Both the Mobility Radeon 9600 and GeForce FX Go5600 are 0.13-micron-process chips with the same four-pixel-pipeline graphics engines, vertex and pixel shaders, and performance-boosting memory-compression algorithms as their desktop counterparts. They also offer the standard battery-saving features (PowerPlay for ATI, PowerMizer for Nvidia), low core voltages (1.0V or less), and similar power requirements to their 0.15-micron mobile predecessors. Entry-Level and Value MobilityThe video archrivals have also introduced new products for the budget notebook sectors, with ATI supplying the Mobility Radeon 9200 and Mobility Radeon 7000M IGP and Nvidia unveiling the GeForce FX Go5200. The ATI offerings are pretty standard, with the Mobility Radeon 9200 being a higher-clocked, AGP 8X version of the existing Mobility Radeon 9000. The Mobility Radeon 7000M IGP is a fully integrated mobile platform, including support for 533MHz- and 400MHz-bus Pentium 4 processors, up to DDR333 memory speeds, and a more powerful Radeon 7500-based video core. Nvidia, on the other hand, has pulled off a coup with the GeForce FX Go5200, which leapfrogs ATI by offering AGP 8X and a DirectX 9 feature set for the entry-level laptop buyer. Benchmark performance probably won't be a cakewalk over the midrange competition, but the chip's feature set makes the GeForce FX Go5200 one to watch. Though clocked at slightly lower speeds than its GeForce FX 5200 Ultra desktop counterpart, it still hits a bullseye as far as the price, performance, and feature requirements of most mobile users. In some ways, it almost looks as if the mobile tail is wagging the desktop dog, as both the ATI Radeon 9600 and Nvidia GeForce FX 5600 desktop announcements didnt make a lot of sense. The former is arguably lower-performance technology than the Radeon 9500 Pro it nominally replaces, and the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra is so far removed from the blazing performance of the FX 5800 Ultra that its similar product name is a real stretch. Now that the new mobile chips have been announced, the strategy starts to make sense, as Nvidia and ATI can use the same mainstream GPUs in both desktop and mobile markets, a cost-saving measure that was definitely not possible previously. The Mobility Radeon 9600 line, GeForce FX Go5600, and Go5200 are cool-running, low-voltage 0.13-micron chips with lots of 3D and multimedia features. Basically, even though the home-desktop variants may prove successful, these smaller, cooler, and cheaper products make a lot more sense when viewed from a portable perspective. The Games People PlayATI and Nvidia have gone to great lengths to promote the DVD playback, HDTV output, and other multimedia- and business-presentation-oriented benefits of their new mobile graphics solutions, but at the end of the day, 3D gaming is a large part of their overall strategy. With so many home PC shoppers looking first at notebooks nowadays, this could be a sound business call, but it does bring its own set of challenges. The most obvious is cost, and the inherent need to combine these higher-end video chips with similar platform and display technology in the form of super-fast Pentium 4 or Athlon XP-M processors, loads of DDR memory, and LCD displays with ultra-low response times. The last is a crucial point, as sub-20-millisecond screen response times are crucial to desktop-CRT-class, fast-motion gaming, but are neither cheap nor highly available in the mass market. It will also be interesting to see what kind of market a true high-end, high-performance portable actually has outside the corporate sector -- in other words, whether user expectations are met or actually exceeded. In some ways, the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro and GeForce FX Go5600 look to be a bit ahead of the technology curve. So the immediate notebook winners might be the Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP, which adds Radeon 7500 video to a low-cost integrated package, and the GeForce FX Go5200, a midrange powerhouse with enough 3D power for good portable gaming. |
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