Gaming Laptop?

[Jimboxy]

OK PC People. My new laptop has an i7 processor with the intel 4400 integrated graphics. It has 4gb's of ram as well. What sort of games am I going to be able to run competently on it? I'm assuming all of the things that crop up in the Humble Indy Bundles will run without issue. Do you think it'll handle more intensive games as well. This is very much new territory for me..

[spatular]

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4400.91979.0.html

[DANGERMAN]

believe it or not Hendo might be the person to ask here, I don't know what the specs are for his laptop but the graphics chip must be similar and he's running Tomb Raider.

google has lots of people saying it's not very good and wont run much, but you never know what standards people are comparing that to. I doubt you'll be running Battlefield or Metro, but 720p on a so so port of a 360 game who knows. Have you not got anything on steam you can test, maybe try a demo of something?

[Hendo]

If the specs are anything like mine (I'll check in a bit), you'll be fine with most stuff.

The fan kicked in pretty loud on Tomb Raider and bad framerates on the two Witcher games but mostly stuff runs fine.

[Jimboxy]

I'm still waiting for it to arrive. The one I have got has a broken spacebar so I'll be getting a replacement on Monday. I'll get a demo of something to test it out. I'm not really planning on using it for games anyway, nice to have the option though.

[Hendo]

]My specs:

So double the RAM of yours but I reckon you'd be fine with quite a few games.

Try some demos on Steam - Stanley Parable, GRID 2, Rayman Legends, etc.

[Sly Reflex]

I'd stick with lighter stuff, Jim. You're not going to be able to run big games like Bioshock Infinite or Tomb Raider. Or rather you will be able to run them, but not at a playable rate.

It should be fine for stuff like Rayman.

[Jimboxy]

Thanks guys. I'll do some experimenting with demo's once it finally gets here.

[DANGERMAN]

Hendo, is there anywhere that tells you what the graphics chip is, that's going to be the problem for Jim?

[Uncle Dokuro]

Jimbo you have the same specs as me only my processor is an AMD equivalent to the Intel i7. You will be able to run the majority of the indie games on Steam - Serious Sam 3, Rise of Triads, Painkiller: Heaven & Hell, Rouge Legacy, Delver, Cave Story.

I've also played stuff like Tropico 4, Euro Trucker 2, SimCity( the new one) Counter Strike GO, State of Decay and Borderlands 2. In fact most strategy game run perfectly on my laptop. The only ones that don't are the newer Total War games Shogun 2 and Rome 2. The settings have to be lowered to run them and they still kinda choppy.

I would recommend looking at the min specs of each game you want to play and poke around the games forum on Steam to see if there are any issues with the game or if issues have been fixed.

You can also poke around my Steam library to see what games run on my system. It not my entire PC library of games, but it will give you an idea of what will run on a i7, 4GB laptop.

Like I said all my stuff on my laptop is AMD, but I have noticed on forums that quite a bit of content on Steam has issues with Intel integrated graphics. Not sure if that is what your laptop has or if it NVidia.

[Hendo]

Hendo, is there anywhere that tells you what the graphics chip is, that's going to be the problem for Jim?

I found this

[DANGERMAN]

I think your chip is a decent amount better than the one in Jim's, relatively speaking at least, I've no idea what that translates to in practice

http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/index.php?gid=1794&gid2=654&compare=intel-hd-graphics-4400-mobile-vs-geforce-gt-635m

[Manicm]

Intel on board graphics have always been on the poor side of things, always best to have a separate graphics card. On the search or a good laptop, as i miss my pc gaming days.

[DANGERMAN]

I had my parents laptop for a week or so and thought I'd try out some games on it (I'd tried steam home-streaming on it). It's a decent laptop (i5 2.4GHz duel core 6 gig of ram), but the graphics on it is a 'Intel HD Graphics Family' chip, which, as it doesn't even have a proper name, is fairly shit. I was actually pretty surprised by what it could run, and even when it struggled generally dropping it down didn't look that bad on the laptop screen

The article is here http://bitparade.co.uk/article.php?id=3297

I tried Borderlands, which needed to be dropped down pretty far to get it running at 30fps, but it ran pretty well and looked alright considering. Batman didn't look or play that well, the outside sections where the problem, far too much draw distance and too many effects. Devil May Cry ran really well, like well enough that anyone with a new laptop would actually be able to play it without feeling like they were making do. Skyrim surprised me too, I thought that would run terribly, big open areas and all that, but it didn't take much to get it to a decent level, the bigger problem was it not staying constant.

Spec Ops The Line ran like shit, I wasn't expecting that, especially as it doesn't look that amazing on my desktop, but I guess that shows it's a console port that they couldn't spend the time to make it scale well

[Pikman]

Mamicm, I need to sell mine. I7, 8GB RAM I think (need to check), dedicated graphics too. It's a Dell Precision M6500