Laptop

[purist]

I was thinking of getting a laptop but, since Doom is the game I play most, I want to be sure it won't spoil my enjoyment. I've never really used a laptop before (certainly not to play games). Does anyone here play Doom on a laptop and have they come across any problems?

[Enjay]

My friend bought a laptop about 3 years ago. At that stage, very few laptops came with good 3D accelerated graphics cards so most modern games were out. however, he has been able to play Zdoom on it flawlessly since day 1.

[Grazza]

In my experience, you can generally expect a laptop to perform slightly less well for games than a desktop machine with similar specifications. However, modern laptops and the graphics cards designed for them are pretty much full-featured, so you're unlikely to have many problems even with hardware-accelerated Doom ports, unless you're looking to get a really cheap, basic laptop. If you're planning to use an exe with software rendering, you'll most likely be OK even then.

My newest laptop is a Pentium-M 745 (Dothan) with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9700, and the game performance seems fully acceptable. It's hard to compare it objectively with an equivalent desktop machine, as the central hardware components are ones designed specifically for laptops. However, I do typically get up to a 50% better framerate in glboom-plus (using, e.g., nuts.wad to test its limits) on this laptop than on my older desktop machine (P4 2.2 GHz with GeForce4 Ti 4600). That's similar to the performance difference between these two machines for purely computational tasks.

My guess is that you should be OK. If you want to be really safe, post here with the specifications of your intended purchase (and the exes that you'll be looking to run on it), and hopefully a hardware expert will read it and say if there are any likely problems.

[Hobbs]

k laptop user here. Firsthand let me tell you that everything in todays laptops works for any game that was made pre-2000 quite fine. My Centrino 1.73 Ghz w/ a GeForce Go 6400 runs any port at 35 FPS almost all the time (stuff like nuts is an obvious exception). Performance is in no way an issue on a laptop. Getting used to your new input layout is.

Try out the mouse that comes with your laptop for a bit (most likely a touchpad). If it doesnt work/your gaming performance drops signifigantly get a mouse. If you intend to carry it about often think about a laptop mouse. The keyboard layout is also a bit more compact, however I find this offers more advantages than anything (except for the lack of a numeric keypad).

[Enjay]

HobbsTiger1 said:

Try out the mouse that comes with your laptop for a bit (most likely a touchpad). If it doesnt work/your gaming performance drops signifigantly get a mouse. If you intend to carry it about often think about a laptop mouse. The keyboard layout is also a bit more compact, however I find this offers more advantages than anything (except for the lack of a numeric keypad).

Sound advice, and pretty much what my friend says about the user interface side of gaming on a laptop.

[purist]

Thanks guys, I was more concerned about the layout issues because I noticed the keyboard was more compact and that there's a touch pad instead of a mouse (I use mouselook).

Still, the points on performance are certainly worth bearing in mind. Since I almost exclusively play classic doom (as opposed to Doom 3) with ZDoom I couldn't forsee any perfomance difficulties. I was looking at spending £400 - £500, which is the lower end of the market for a new laptop. Not sure on specs yet...