I am looking into getting a laptop and Im wondering about laptop graphics cards.
I am looking for cheapest available and they all seem to have IGP chips. Intel GMA 900-950 or ATI radeon 200M.
Does anyone have any of these cards? Im wondering if performance is going to be awful as my first comp had a SIS IGP chip and it sucked.
I dont expect to really play games on the laptop but I will be using JME so performance is important.
thanks for replys 
I've always liked the laptops with ATI cards. My mac laptop has a radeon 9700 mobility and that has done real nice for both jME and games.
yeah its looking like best deal is toshiba with radeon 200m for $550. I wish I could get as good as radeon 9700 but not for under $1000
and probably even more for a mac
I purchased an Acer aspire 5652WLMi with Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 for 1500 euros before 2 months and i definitely recommend it .
Intel Core Duo, 100Gb sata disk and 1gb ram.
I purchased an Acer aspire 5652WLMi with Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 for 1500 euros before 2 months and i definitely recommend it .
Intel Core Duo, 100Gb sata disk and 1gb ram.
Im not sure about brands like acer and averatec they are cheaper, but the guy at circuit city told me averatec laptops arrive broken more than any other brand they sell. He also said stay away from Compaq.
If you have to choose between the 200m and the 950, go with the 200m. Not only will it outperform the 950 by quite a bit, it's drivers have much better support for OpenGL. In fact, Intel has sold quite a lot of these Ati chipsets on their own-brand motherboards, for these reasons.
However, a stand alone card will still be many times faster. If you're willing to go up to 1000$ you could try to go for an AMD Turion / Ati combination. Eg. the Ati X700 mobility is an excellent mobile card (I have the desktop version of this card actually), and should be selling rather cheap right now because Ati is clearing their inventory because now they have the X1300/X1400 line.
Of course you should consider what other things you want from a laptop (battery life, weight, noise, display quality, wireless options, brand and what not), but if you want high specs for less money that could be a direction to look into, eg. http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=15660812
AMD Turion is actually a pretty good processor for laptop (great performance, and doesn't run as hot as the old AMDs), and I don't think you'll find any ~1000$ laptops with 1 gig of RAM, 120 GB HDD and a half decent graphics card without one in it.
thanks for the replys, I am still looking and I found an interesting article I had to post about brand names and who makes them.
http://www.powernotebooks.com/articles/index.php?action=fullnews&id=17
well, Ive looked at every laptop that exists, and I think I found the best deal. Its a dell from their website for $705 with free shipping.
It has 1.8ghz core solo and radeon x1400 grafix card. grab a coupon code from here if your interested http://www.notebookforums.com/forum104.html also here is good link comparing laptop grafix cards http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=39568 8)
i don't recommend the x1400. we bought a "super mega demo computer laptop" at work. dual centrino etc. but the comp performed a lot worse than my older laptop with a geforce 6800 go, probably due to x1400's worthless shared memory thingy…we are going to "go" for a geforce go 7800/7900 instead, or perhaps mobility 9800…
I think a 7800/7900 is $705 on it's own 
If you compare the x1400 vs. the intel integrated chipset found in most laptops at that price, I think you got a good deal. Yes, it uses shared memory… but that means it does not use expensive graphics memory. At least the x1400 means you can probably watch some high resulotion videos on your laptop in the future.
a friend of mine bought a laptop with an x700 with 64mb a few month ago for around 1000
also, we had to try one hundred different hacked drivers before getting rid of lots of shader issues…but the official drivers are probably improving every day…
i don't recommend the x1400. we bought a "super mega demo computer laptop" at work. dual centrino etc. but the comp performed _a lot_ worse than my older laptop with a geforce 6800 go, probably due to x1400's worthless shared memory thingy...we are going to "go" for a geforce go 7800/7900 instead, or perhaps mobility 9800...
well I dont expect it to be as good as a 6800 go, the 6800 is nvidias high end card, the x1400 is ati's ati's budget card and its not even going to beat a 6600 go but for a cheap card im sure its about 2x-3x as good as integrated graphics. I was not expecting a "gaming laptop" for <= $700 just the best graphics card/laptop combo in that price range.
Mud or anyone else have you had any luck finding a cheap laptop solution? I'm also in line for picking up a new semi-decent gaming/development laptop.
I'm basically looking for something that can run jME development and most modern games good enough, and the price should be <= $1000 USD. Any suggestions on what mobile graphics chips to look for, or stay away from, or any full laptop suggestions?
I've looked at some Sager, Alienware, Dell but they seem pretty expensive, and I'm wondering what the minimum suggested graphics card would be (Geforce 7400?). Some really nice Sony ones are out there (light weight, compact size, dual core, nvidia geforce 7400).
I just need something for the next 6 to 12 months, then I think I'm going to drop a ton of money on a high end laptop once there are mobile graphics cards that support shader model 4.0, directx10, and have a unified shader pipeline (IE: Nvidia G80 line like the Geforce 8800 coming in mid-november). Why I want to do that is, I figure the baseline for 3D graphics in the coming years (3-5) is pretty much driven by the baseline hardware of the latest console systems (PS3, XBOX 360). I want to get a laptop that will be able to support console game play and development and I figure any PC game that comes out will most likely be out for PS3 or XBox 360 (although that is a pretty big generalization), and so on a PC it has to run on console equivalent hardware (unified shader pipeline, directX 10).
AFAIK G80 will not have unified shaders. You'd have to wait for Ati's R600 (probably coming out somewhere in feb.). But it's not really an important feature anyway.
You're right I think the G80 was still going to have seperate vertex and pixel pipelines. I agree, the unified shader stuff means nothing as far as graphical capability, it's more just a hardware design decision.
Basically my point is I think a laptop with the latest "console" like harware will probably have a lifetime as long as the console, which IMHO is important especially now that the latest consoles are coming out right now, and console hardware will remain the same for the next 3 to 5 years.
Haha I guess I'm just hoping I don't buy something and have it become immediately obsolete, because it won't support DirectX 10 or the latest shader model (although I couldn't imagine game developers only developing for only the highest end, so I guess I shouldn't worry to much).
well I ended up with a dell e1505 for $700US w/ shipping. has 1.8Ghz coro solo, 60GB HDD, 512M mem, radeon x1400. I would call it a mid-range graphics card, it plays Battlefield2 but gets choppy at max settings. Im quite happy with it overall.
edit: dont forget the coupon code, saved me about $100 extra
When I play BF2 I run GameOS and that helps remove choppiness entirely.
geee darkfrog from which highway did you scratch your avatar? 
(sorry i couldn't stop myslef)
Found it on the way home…nice and flat, you like?