Alienware Area-51 m9750: Power Gaming on the Go
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Actual Gaming Performance
We have selected a group of modern games for testing with our laptops - at least, those that can actually run games. We have dropped most of the 0xAA results for this article because the m9750 has more than enough power to run with antialiasing enabled. In a few charts we have multiple results at different settings from the m9750 as well, just to show how it performs when graphical settings are maxed out.
In a couple games (Battlefield 2 and Far Cry), the m9750 is clearly CPU limited even at the maximum 1920x1200 resolution. As these are older, less demanding titles that's not too surprising, and we will probably be dropping both from our testing in the near future. In the more demanding games like Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Quake 4, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the performance boost that SLI gives the m9750 can make a huge difference in terms of playable resolution. However, there's one game that clearly doesn't benefit from SLI, at least right now. Supreme Commander scores about the same on the M1710 and m9750, and the decreasing performance with increasing resolution clearly shows that we're not CPU limited above 1440x900. This brings us to what is arguably the biggest problem with the Alienware Area-51 m9750.
In a word, the difficulty is drivers, specifically SLI enabled drivers. If you recall earlier, we mentioned that the m9750 uses an Intel 945PM chipset. Alienware uses a custom motherboard that is able to run both graphics cards with x8 PCI-E connections, but the non-NVIDIA chipset still presents a problem. It's no secret that NVIDIA is able to run SLI on a variety of chipsets, but their drivers have normally locked support to their own solutions. NVIDIA created a special driver release for Alienware that enables SLI for the 945PM platform; unfortunately, that driver hasn't been updated since March.
SLI (and ATI's CrossFire) have often been in a chicken vs. egg race when it comes to supporting new games. Sometimes a custom profile in NVIDIA's drivers is all that's necessary, but frequently additional driver updates are needed in order to support the latest titles. In the case of Windows Vista, GeForce 7000 series cards are still waiting for proper SLI drivers. Needless to say, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX certainly doesn't have a higher priority for NVIDIA's driver team than all of the desktop SLI owners. Alienware currently has a beta Vista driver that's supposed to enable SLI support on some titles, and hopefully a full release driver will be available sometime in the near future. However, it's only a matter of time before the driver gets outdated again; how long and how frequently NVIDIA will continue to update the GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI drivers is anyone's guess.
To drive the point home, consider the recently released Bioshock. Yes, we installed the game on the m9750 and gave it a whirl. Initially, performance was absolutely atrocious. We tried a hacked driver from LaptopVideo2Go that allowed us to install the v163.44 "Bioshock" driver on the m9750, but while it did technically work it appears to have broken SLI support in all titles and it didn't fix the Bioshock performance issues we were encountering. Then we decided to disable SLI in the driver control panel, and performance suddenly became perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, we encountered graphical artifacts - black squares would appear frequently in place of textures - so we decided to go back to the "official" 94.23 drivers. Those drivers also exhibit the same problem with black squares appearing in place of certain polygons/textures, and SLI needs to be disabled to get Bioshock to run properly for the time being.
The bottom line is that video driver updates are a fact of life when it comes to gaming, and they are even more critical if you're running a multiple GPU configuration. Quite a few people have been disappointed of late with NVIDIA's driver release schedule, but at least we can be reasonably certain that SLI will eventually be supported in Windows Vista. Considering how many people are likely to own one of the GeForce Go 79x0 SLI laptops, we would imagine that driver updates will occur less frequently, so it might be months after the release of a new game before proper driver support becomes available. Remember, the last driver update is from March of this year - 5 months ago. So we're looking at a laptop that targets the gaming enthusiast but will only get new drivers perhaps twice a year.
None of this is really Alienware's fault; they just use NVIDIA hardware. And NVIDIA might actually prove us wrong and start releasing more frequent driver updates. We wouldn't be willing to place any bets on NVIDIA doing that, however, which makes it more than a little difficult for us to recommend the m9750 to gamers that want to play all of the latest and greatest games. Of course, for those that have their favorite older titles that they repeatedly play, the drivers are already fully functional and this isn't as much of a concern. Professional gamers might find just what they're looking for in the m9750, but we're not professional gamers so we can't say for sure.
We have selected a group of modern games for testing with our laptops - at least, those that can actually run games. We have dropped most of the 0xAA results for this article because the m9750 has more than enough power to run with antialiasing enabled. In a few charts we have multiple results at different settings from the m9750 as well, just to show how it performs when graphical settings are maxed out.
In a couple games (Battlefield 2 and Far Cry), the m9750 is clearly CPU limited even at the maximum 1920x1200 resolution. As these are older, less demanding titles that's not too surprising, and we will probably be dropping both from our testing in the near future. In the more demanding games like Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Quake 4, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the performance boost that SLI gives the m9750 can make a huge difference in terms of playable resolution. However, there's one game that clearly doesn't benefit from SLI, at least right now. Supreme Commander scores about the same on the M1710 and m9750, and the decreasing performance with increasing resolution clearly shows that we're not CPU limited above 1440x900. This brings us to what is arguably the biggest problem with the Alienware Area-51 m9750.
In a word, the difficulty is drivers, specifically SLI enabled drivers. If you recall earlier, we mentioned that the m9750 uses an Intel 945PM chipset. Alienware uses a custom motherboard that is able to run both graphics cards with x8 PCI-E connections, but the non-NVIDIA chipset still presents a problem. It's no secret that NVIDIA is able to run SLI on a variety of chipsets, but their drivers have normally locked support to their own solutions. NVIDIA created a special driver release for Alienware that enables SLI for the 945PM platform; unfortunately, that driver hasn't been updated since March.
SLI (and ATI's CrossFire) have often been in a chicken vs. egg race when it comes to supporting new games. Sometimes a custom profile in NVIDIA's drivers is all that's necessary, but frequently additional driver updates are needed in order to support the latest titles. In the case of Windows Vista, GeForce 7000 series cards are still waiting for proper SLI drivers. Needless to say, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX certainly doesn't have a higher priority for NVIDIA's driver team than all of the desktop SLI owners. Alienware currently has a beta Vista driver that's supposed to enable SLI support on some titles, and hopefully a full release driver will be available sometime in the near future. However, it's only a matter of time before the driver gets outdated again; how long and how frequently NVIDIA will continue to update the GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI drivers is anyone's guess.
To drive the point home, consider the recently released Bioshock. Yes, we installed the game on the m9750 and gave it a whirl. Initially, performance was absolutely atrocious. We tried a hacked driver from LaptopVideo2Go that allowed us to install the v163.44 "Bioshock" driver on the m9750, but while it did technically work it appears to have broken SLI support in all titles and it didn't fix the Bioshock performance issues we were encountering. Then we decided to disable SLI in the driver control panel, and performance suddenly became perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, we encountered graphical artifacts - black squares would appear frequently in place of textures - so we decided to go back to the "official" 94.23 drivers. Those drivers also exhibit the same problem with black squares appearing in place of certain polygons/textures, and SLI needs to be disabled to get Bioshock to run properly for the time being.
The bottom line is that video driver updates are a fact of life when it comes to gaming, and they are even more critical if you're running a multiple GPU configuration. Quite a few people have been disappointed of late with NVIDIA's driver release schedule, but at least we can be reasonably certain that SLI will eventually be supported in Windows Vista. Considering how many people are likely to own one of the GeForce Go 79x0 SLI laptops, we would imagine that driver updates will occur less frequently, so it might be months after the release of a new game before proper driver support becomes available. Remember, the last driver update is from March of this year - 5 months ago. So we're looking at a laptop that targets the gaming enthusiast but will only get new drivers perhaps twice a year.
None of this is really Alienware's fault; they just use NVIDIA hardware. And NVIDIA might actually prove us wrong and start releasing more frequent driver updates. We wouldn't be willing to place any bets on NVIDIA doing that, however, which makes it more than a little difficult for us to recommend the m9750 to gamers that want to play all of the latest and greatest games. Of course, for those that have their favorite older titles that they repeatedly play, the drivers are already fully functional and this isn't as much of a concern. Professional gamers might find just what they're looking for in the m9750, but we're not professional gamers so we can't say for sure.
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Guspaz - Saturday, September 1, 2007 - link
Anybody considering buying a gaming notebook should refuse to purchase one until nVidia gets their act together and starts releasing notebook drivers with regularity.I myself am a notebook gamer, with a modest Dell Inspiron 9400, Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz, and aGeForce Go 7900gs. I run Vista.
Well, nVidia currently DOES NOT OFFER Vista notebook drivers at all. Not a one, nada. Your only options are to either use Dell's driver, which is an ancient beta missing support for most features of the GPU, or a hacked desktop driver (which still is missing many features under Vista, and lacks PowerMizer support).
Under XP, the situation isn't much better. nVidia's latest notebook drivers for XP are 84.63, released over a year ago on July 5, 2006.
Your notebook manufacturer MIGHT provide newer drivers, if you're LUCKY. For Dell's part, their XP drivers are still ancient and stuck in the 90 series, and they only ever released ONE driver for Vista, probably thinking "Well, they have drivers now, that's good enough."
In order to play BioShock on a notebook, you have NO other option but to hack the desktop drivers.
This is NOT an acceptable situation. As notebook gamers, we should REQUIRE nVidia to SUPPORT THEIR PRODUCT and release regular updates for their cards. The fact that their desktop drivers work so well on notebooks with a simple INF tweak should show you how EASY it would be for them to release official notebook drivers. They give us this bullshit story about how driver updates need to come from the notebook manufacturers due to differences between notebooks. This is bullshit. I don't get my desktop graphics drivers from Abit because they happen to have made the motherboard.
So what do I plan to do? I have no choice. I'll keep using hacked desktop drivers for lack of ANY other option.
monitorjbl - Saturday, August 25, 2007 - link
Yay, a William Gibson reference!
JarredWalton - Saturday, August 25, 2007 - link
Bonus points if you actually played the old Neuromancer game by Interplay. Cue Devo...Some
Things
Ne-ver
Change
....
:)
strafejumper - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
i never understood the concept of all these laptops such as this alienwarethe idea of a laptop to me is it is portable
however if the battery only last 60 mins it is not really that portable
for $5000 i would want to be able to for example watch a dvd
however this cannot even do that seemingly simple task!
battery life to me is so much more useful than the extra cpu and gpu cycles
when watching a dvd, browsing the internet, playing cards, backgammon, chess or other simple games, listening to music, typing documents, emailing, messengering etc. etc. the extra horsepower of the cpu and gpu are not even being used.
battery life > some extra frames in the latest game (which is better on a desktop probably anyway with bigger screen, full keyboard + mouse, desk, speakers, etc.)
Inkjammer - Saturday, August 25, 2007 - link
I am one of the people who have bought, buy and will buy workstations like these. People like me don't buy them as a "laptop" but as a "portable desktop replacement" (DTR).Some of the justifications:
Lugging an entire system to LAN parties can be frustrating, especially since I have a 24" monitor, large keyboard. I'm also using a Coolermaster 830 CM Stacker case, which weighs a ton, and breaking it down, setting it up can take far, far too long.
I also tend to take my DTR notebooks systems with me to work, where I can game during nightshifts. I'm also stationed overseas, so being able to easily transport a FULL system, even if contains in a laptop, is invaluable. I also do high end art and 3D animation, and need the additional power for job and hobby.
The tradeoff for portability and battery life on a notebook is fairly steep, but there's not much in the way of compromise.
And yes, I have a second laptop for my "on the go" needs.
yyrkoon - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
Some people do not have room for a desktop(or a desk), and use nothing but laptops. Others may travel, staying in hotels nightly, having a plug available, but do not want to tote around a desktop with them. Other people like truckers may be able to use an AC inverter for power, but have limited room in their sleepers for a computer.Having said that, I have been a trucker, and kept a full sized desktop in my sleeper, and I have also worked over the road, staying in a hotel nightly, and used a desktop during this time as well. Not everyone is like me however, and some of these people may preffer something smaller, and easier to carry around, or maybe just smaller to maximize their given 'alotted space' where ever they may be. I wouldnt buy one though . . .
wolfman3k5 - Saturday, August 25, 2007 - link
Well, how about there east bound, you got your ears on? I totally know what you mean, how ever I never had time for gaming. Battery life was always more important to me. I'm also an ex trucker, God, it's a lonely job. Anyway, just wanted to say hi:)yyrkoon - Monday, August 27, 2007 - link
Myself, for 2 years(and around 200k miles) I would typically drive 8HRs/day, 2-3 months at a time. Plenty of down time, and plenty of time to game, even in the early to mid 90's ;) Of course back then, there was nothing like this availible, and I was probably one of the first drivers to have a full blown desktop in their cab(IMB compatable 386SX-25 with 4 MB of ram YEEE HAAW!) lol . . .yyrkoon - Monday, August 27, 2007 - link
IBM compatable . . .JarredWalton - Monday, August 27, 2007 - link
IBM compatible you mean? :)