"Laptop or mobile versions of the above supported video cards have not had extensive testing and may have driver or other performance issues."
There's our developer's problem, right there. The vast majority of PC's sold in the USA in particular, and on earth generally, are notebooks ~ and their proportion of total sales continues skyrocketing, with a strong concentration on "substitute desktops" e.g. gaming notebooks.
The quote I gave is on the box or gaming notes of every computer game on earth. But very few top houses make a strong effort to write the code to make that game doable under the condition mentioned (... the condition that min and rec specs do not count at all because laptops GPU specs are eseentially meaningless).
BioWare is a perfect example of a great house who won't pay the price to give a little in order to get a little).
What's my point and what's it got to do with the title of this article?
Everything.
ME2 is an example of a game that truly requires every centimeter of spec quoted based on poor coding unworthy of a PC and that's for a desktop in the bargain! Where laptops are concerned - even something fully loaded with two times the horsepower that was available the day this article was written on a 12-lb 18.3" Toshiba Qosmio i-5 Nvdia's GTS 360M 1 GB vRAM running 1650 x 945p (native) monitor no backlighting on the $1,099 machine, Harmon-Kardon Surround Sound or what I just finished playing ME2 on ~ an MSI 15.6" i5-750 with ATI Mobility 5850 running 1680 x 1050p (native) double backlit LED / LCD monitor and keyboard ~ no one cares about old-fashioned horsepower because this is a new game.
I don't need quality speakers for a 18" monitor because they don't exist no matter the name on them but I need power to run a set of Sennheiser 7.1 Surround Sound cans and sufficient juice in DX11 3D to double up on our 36" Samsung.
You have to decide what sort of gamer you are. If you require 100 fps (exaggeration lol) on any hardware in order to deliver fluid gameplay, there's something wrong with your configuration and the quality of your monitor. If you're not a FPS gamer ~ I could care less about FPS ... am a ME 2 / FO 3 / Bioshock type of immersive gamer and the only game I'm looking forward to this year is FO Vegas.
Gimme two great games a year and I'm a happy camper but they need muchos meat in terms of interactive RPG fiction with just enough kill-the-mutants blam power to rebuild the next dystopia. All you need is 20 - 30 fps to view well-coded 3D visual FOV.
The fact that I got lucky and nailed a third game this year ... L4D2 has been too funny for words. And exciting too. OK the story, well, doesn't need to make a lotta sense as in from beginning to end, but still it's not a fps game. Crysis is my idea of a fps demo - Crytek are brilliant and the art of their work is brilliant but the game still bored me silly.
I'll tell you when stuff gets weird. When you have Mike Dell flogging an 11" Alienware with a 335M with a single core 1.3 GHz Pentium and no need for an optical drive cos it's a mobile broadband speed demon taking its games down down from the cloud for $800?? At most, it's worth $450 because it'll take $1K of Verizon garbage and all the rest to have a hope in heck of running any current game.
The critics loved it @ CES for the same reason they love all pc games - because they get freebies to keep after running a 15 minute demo 12 minutes of which is streaming video + blaring tinny sound from two 1/2" alienspeakers.
And it's not even a game - every time you go online at mobile broadband rates, you gotta watch the same one hour movie to play eight minutes of gaming and on an 11" netbook in the bargain.
My husband got one for free from his work - they make real big computers lol and he collects all kinds of hardware - and I saw him throw it on his desk in the den like he does with his wallet when he gets home from work. I asked him what the heck it was. He explained, grinning, and said two words "Steam pre-loaded, no less". We broke up. He asked me what should we do with it .. when our six year-old daughter walked in and we looked at each other and back at her and I asked him for a live broadband cable line, jammed it in ... it lit up and I handed it to her. Her eyes went up and her jaw dropped - totally speechless.
"Whatsit do??? Movies?"
"No. You play games on it. Daddy built it just for you at work today."
"OH, I LOVE IT!! How do you play it?"
"Umm. Lemme look. [Portal lights up]. OK, there ya go. Chase the lady and catch her."
Pure heaven. It's perfect for 6 year-old old's. All we heard for the next hour was "ohh! I can't catch her!! How do ya catch her and win???"
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