Gaming on laptop

Are there any laptops at Currys in the £300-£600 range that would be any good for the odd game as well as the usual laptop related stuff ?

I'm not talking about the latest games at the highest settings, maybe the Call of Duty, modern warfare, Rome or Footy Manager.

The one below is a refurbished HP one, would this do the job ?

Intel® Core™ i7-5500U Processor, Dual-core, 2.4 GHz, 4 MB cache

Memory (RAM) 12 GB DDR3L

Graphics card - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M (4 GB DDR3)

Might do, might not.

Laptops aren't really designed for gaming, even laptops sold as 'gaming laptops' can't really hold a candle to a proper desktop setup.

You will have alot of issues with heat gaming on a laptop, which might mean you've got alot of cooling fans installed, which at full pelt will sound like a hurricane in the room.

Might do, might not.

 

Laptops aren't really designed for gaming, even laptops sold as 'gaming laptops' can't really hold a candle to a proper desktop setup.

 

You will have alot of issues with heat gaming on a laptop, which might mean you've got alot of cooling fans installed, which at full pelt will sound like a hurricane in the room.

I know there's no comparison with a desktop, buy that's not an option. I'm not talking about hard core gaming for 10 hours a day

In fairness geared, for the old-ish titles the OP mentioned (Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Rome, Football Manager), the posted spec (i7, GTX850M, 12GB RAM) should run them all without even batting an eyelid, never mind breaking a sweat.

My SFF desktop runs all of these and newer (e.g. Grid Autosport) on max settings at well over 60 fps, with an AMD Phenom X3 paired with a meagre 4GB DDR3, a budget passive low-profile Radeon R7, all powered by a puny 220W SFF PSU, and that laptop spec buries it.

I'd expect that spec to run just about anything current in playable form on at least low- to medium settings. Of course, we're not talking Project Cars with all the eye candy on max settings, or Dolphin in 5760 x 1080 in stereoscopic 3D...but that's not the use of the OP

It is an old-fashioned notion that laptops won't do for gaming. It depends on the hardware but a modern (mobile) GPU or even APU system will play games without issue. As Loob says, might not be the same as on a desktop, but even that is arguable. Try finding a desktop for 500£ that will play games well, these days, pound-for-pound there is very little in it any more.

A big factor in this is that PC games are increasingly hemmed in to comply with console-specs, the days of massively complicated graphics improving from year to year are behind us.

Edit: Just to add - most games STILL work on only one core, keep that in mind with your selection. So the i7 as stated will do just fine.

I disagree, it has been Direct X 11 that has been holding things back.

They can do things on the current weak consoles that is impossible on a comparable PC, as the GPU can only be accessed by a single core at a time. Then again, a single core on most PCs is WAY more powerful than a core in the consoles, which has mostly offset the problem.

That should change with Windows 10. Once games properly scale to multiple cores the improvement should be seen on PC and console alike. They can't push GPUs as hard on PC right now as they are bottlenecked by only using a single CPU core.

I disagree, it has been Direct X 11 that has been holding things back.

They can't push GPUs as hard on PC right now as they are bottlenecked by only using a single CPU core.

Thanks for the above but I'm now a bit confused..

Are you saying that no games at the moment use more than 1 CPU core?

Yes they can, for anything that isn't graphics related. But as everything has to remain in sync, it causes inefficiency in the whole game engine as the rest of the game logic will be left waiting for that one core to be free.

Also as the consoles are designed around several weak CPU cores sharing the load equally, which is the opposite of what DirectX 11 is doing, porting between the two is far from optimal right now.

Thanks for the explanation. I only asked as some of my past games have settings to enable several cores.

Cant wait for DX12 then!

The problem is how long developers will continue supporting DX11. As to get the best out of DX12 the whole engine needs to be designed around it.

So even once Windows 10 comes out, it could be years before we see the full benefit.

I disagree, it has been Direct X 11 that has been holding things back.

 

They can do things on the current weak consoles that is impossible on a comparable PC, as the GPU can only be accessed by a single core at a time. Then again, a single core on most PCs is WAY more powerful than a core in the consoles, which has mostly offset the problem.

 

That should change with Windows 10. Once games properly scale to multiple cores the improvement should be seen on PC and console alike. They can't push GPUs as hard on PC right now as they are bottlenecked by only using a single CPU core.

It is a combination of the technical factor you mentioned and the budget factor I mentioned. A recent example is The Witcher 3, which the devs admitted had been scaled down from original plans for the PC due to the overhead compared to console quality. An even more telling example is GTA V, it didn't take them well over half a year to just balance code for the PC, they actually made the game a lot more impressive graphically during that time, which goes to show that A) developing for console quality is quicker/cheaper and B) that PCs can push the envelope further than most actual games demonstrate.

Anyway, point still is: Don't worry about getting a laptop with a goodish GPU to play games on.

They also said they wouldn't be able to afford to do the PC version at all without the income from the console versions, making your point moot.

They also explained the graphical downgrade was due to discovering that the way they were doing things at that graphical quality just didn't work as they made the world bigger. At no point that I have seen did they actually blame it on console at all.

Even if you assume they mean "it wouldn't scale to console", that also suggests it wouldn't scale well on PC either. If that was the case, they HAD to ditch it even if they were targeting only PC. They need an engine than can scale across a wide range of hardware.

The hope is that DX12 will put developers on a level playing field so they don't HAVE to put primary focus on console or PC. Hopefully able to use a single code base that will scale across all platforms, by basically using the same programming techniques, multi-threading properly across all available CPU cores, etc. That fact that right now what works best for console works worst for PC, and vice versa, is definitely holding things back.