ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
HD Gaming Comparison
We'll start out with a comparison of performance at 1920x1080 in order to focus squarely on the intended use of these notebooks. We will have performance results at 1680x1050 later, as well as detailed results on the next page. The easiest way to look at things is to look at the relative performance in terms of percentages. We have several charts that break things down, starting with the comparison of NVIDIA's 8800M GTX SLI and ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.
If we look at average performance, this is actually a very close match up. We suspect that with a faster dual-core processor, the ATI solution would take the lead as we are CPU limited in many of these titles. However, there are definitely games where NVIDIA excels and other titles where ATI holds a clear lead. The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena, FEAR 2: Project Origin, and Mirror's Edge all clearly favor NVIDIA -- and that's not even taking PhysX support in Mirror's Edge into account. On the other hand, Call of Duty: World at War, Empire: Total War, STALKER: Clear Sky, and to a lesser extent Race Driver: GRID and Crysis (at medium detail) all favor the ATI solution. It's worth noting that this is the best-case scenario for ATI, since we are using the optimal driver configuration with the beta ATI driver. Let's see what the beta driver does for performance relative to the original driver.
Obviously, the newer titles stand to benefit most from the updated driver. Despite not being as recent as some of the other titles are, Mirror's Edge sees the biggest performance boost, indicating CrossFire support is now present in the beta driver. Empire: Total War illustrates another important point. We capped the "percent improvement" at 300%, but the reality is that the game was unplayable with the earlier driver. CrossFire mode -- which can't be disabled on the ASUS W90Vp -- causes severe rendering errors, so that most of the objects in the game are not visible. The newer driver fixes the situation, but we are left to wonder how many other games might suffer from similar incompatibilities. A couple games also see small performance drops (Fallout 3 and Mass Effect), and STALKER: Clear Sky performance is cut nearly in half. Many of the remaining titles show improvements on the order of 10% to 20%.
Before we continue, we must again point out that NVIDIA is severely handicapped in this comparison since we are using the bleeding edge, brand-new ATI Mobility Radeon 4870 CrossFire and comparing it to GeForce 8800M GTX SLI, which is over a year old. The 9800M GTX has 112 SPs, potentially improving performance by 17%, while the GTX 260M and 280M increase the gap even more. The GTX 280M has 128 SPs running at 585/1463MHz core/shader, compared to 96 SPs at 500/1250MHz. Core and performance are therefore up to 56% higher, with almost 19% more memory bandwidth. We will be providing our best apples-to-apples comparison between the Mobility 4870 CrossFire and GTX 280M SLI in the near future. ATI currently trades blows with the 8800M GTX, depending on the title, but the driver situation still greatly concerns us. Let's investigate a little more to show why.
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buzznut - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
Looky there, I went and missed "bash AMD day"Damn, they're prolly still reeling.
Johnmcl7 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
In the specs for this machine it lists an 8x DVDR drive initially, then refers to it as a blu-ray drive just further down - I assume the first entry should read bd-rom/dvd-r combo.I have to say the pictures are extremely disappointing as the main shots of the laptop are badly underexposed concealing most of the details. I do realise these machines are not easy to get a picture of but normally the pictures in reviews are pretty decent. It would be good to see some pictures with some standard items (DVD cases or something) when the laptop is open to get a better idea of the scale, I think the sleek look makes it look smaller than it is especially given it makes the D901C look small which I didn't think possible.
As for the laptop itself I did consider one of these mainly because the price was good but decided against it due to the size/weight. I had a Dell XPS 2 then M1710 and I think that's really the upper limit to carry around with me. I have an XPS M1730 at the moment and it never leaves the house as combined with its huge powerpack makes it quite a bit bigger and heavier than the M1710, there's no way I would go bigger again.
It's a shame to see the driver situation is so poor when the performance is clearly there, it's not very encouraging for other companies to pick up mobile ATI parts either.
mrbios - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Jarred (or anyone who may purchase this notebook), I have a different Asus laptop that has the same multimedia touchpad, and I did find a way to disable it. Go into the Mouse control panel, go to Device Settings, expand tapping, click on tap zones, and uncheck "enable tap zones".garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Why is it so difficult to get good display drivers for games? The OpenGL interface is well defined so what's the problem with writing a driver for it that game developers can have confidence it will work according to spec.?Is this a case of the hardware manufacturers screwing up with the driver or the game developers trying to get around the API to work directly with the hardware or a bit of both? Frankly, I don't care. If I want to play a game on a computer, it should install and work just like any other piece of software or hardware.
Hopefully AMD/ATI's release of details of their API will help bring stability and performance, at least for Linux games. Now will NVidia follow suit and allow the open source community to build their own drivers to end this proprietary "buggy driver" lunacy?
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I believe most of the driver updates are to optimize the way the GPU executes certain code. In theory, the drivers should run all code properly but not optimally. The reality, sadly, is that the "properly" part is only correct about 80% of the time with new titles. Add CrossFire into the mix and that seems to drop down to 50%. If you have a regular dual card CrossFire setup, disabling CrossFire in the CCC often solves compatibility issues, but that's not an option on the drivers I've received for the W90Vp.In the case of Empire: Total War it looked like the drivers were rendering properly on one card but not on the other. If I grabbed a screenshot via the PrintScreen button, everything looked correct, but looking at the screen only the landscaping and sky were always visible and correct. The units, trees, buildings, etc. were only visible about 10% of the frames, which pretty much means you can't play the game.
mbaroud - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I own one the W90VP-A1.I have been dyingto update the drivers, it sucks running on OUTDATED drivers :(
nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
If these are simply mobile desktop replacements why doesn't somebody get on making a desktop built into the screen already?And I don't mean the hideous monstrosity that is the Dell XP1.
I am all for laptops, but this form factor is silly above 15.4" in my opinion.
(that said, I love the tech, it is very cool.)
Jackattak - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Dunno if you've been asleep for the past two years but just about every major PC manufacturer offers a desktop built-in to the screen nowadays, none of which are "hideous" (strictly my opinion, but I find it hard to find a screen "hideous", and that's essentially all these offerings are is a screen).garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
It's generally cheaper and faster to run multiple desktops in the locations you need than to lug a "desktop replacement" around. Just keep your documents (and other settings) on a USB key or implement an Internet synchronization scheme.The simple fact is that you cannot get anything that can be reasonably called a laptop to match the performance of a desktop. Laptops don't have the space for multiple drives, they can't dissipate heat as well, and they certainly can't accommodate expansion.
To get the same performance of a desktop in a mobile platform, you have to wait for the technology to become available then pay a premium for the privilege. People have been saying laptops are getting near desktop performance for decades. What is actually happening however is the price of admission for an application platform has been decreasing.
You can get a resonable desktop today for what a hard drive would have cost you twenty years ago. However, if you want cutting edge power, you need a desktop or larger.
frozentundra123456 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
The charts are technically labelled incorrectly. I believe for instance the first chart, black bar, means the ratio of nVidia performance to ATI, not percent improvement as it is labelled. Saying "102 percent improvement" actually means that the nVidia solution is twice as fast as the ATI, which from reading the rest of the article appears not to be what the author meant. The rest of the charts are labelled in this way also.