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Gaming Notebooks: The Full Story

Author	Stuart Andrews
Published	22nd Mar 2007

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The big surprise with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – a game that had crippled my own gaming system with full dynamic lighting turned on – was that it actually would run on the Pegasus at Medium settings and with the slightly less intensive Object Lighting system turned on. All the same, the frame rate still jerked up and down quite perceptibly, and switching to Static lighting made the game less visually impressive, but certainly a lot more playable. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is known to be particularly memory hungry, so it’s quite possible that with another 1GB of RAM it could run smoothly with some of the detail options pushed back up.

The top image shows S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with settings at maximum, the bottom image has setting at a playable level.

Next, it was time for an MMORPG. Oddly enough, this was one genre where using a lightweight notebook really makes sense: RPG-style combat doesn’t require the ultra-fast responsiveness of FPS games, and your loved ones are slightly less likely to object when you spend hours of your free time in a fantasy land should you do so sitting in the same room. That said, my test subject – Vanguard: Saga of Heroes – demanded a few compromises. Powered by the Unreal 2.0 engine, it’s probably the most demanding MMORPG on the market today. Switching Render Quality to the High Performance mode and selecting Simple Terrain enabled a playable frame rate, with the advanced detail options and features – HDR lighting, Volumetric Clouds and Tree LOD blend, for example – either toned down dramatically or switched off altogether.