Test results: 3D applications

The biggest difference between my personal Acer notebook and this MSI gaming portable might be the addition of a real 3D accelerator, i.e. the NVIDIA 9600M GT. Most people out there already know how poorly current Intel mobile graphic cards perform in 3D applications, here is what we measured in our 3D applications of choice:



Where the Turbo mode gives a small performance boost in 2D apps, in FM's 3D Mark software the increase in performance as rather small and only useful for getting higher benchmark scores. Lowering the cpu clock down to 1,6GHz increases the performance penalty but even now the performance is not bad knowing how Intel graphics can hardly run any 3D test fluently. Office mode does make a big difference though and in some occasions we found the system to perform only half as fast as it where in default power profile.

Because the Intel onboard graphics chips is such low performing it is obvious that it will not run any modern game in any decent way, even older games may not run hassle free. Therefore we didn't even bother testing the Intel VGA I couldn’t see the point, some games would not even start with minimum details enabled…



Our first game of choice is TrackMania Nations Forever, build upon an older engine this game is quickly satisfied when it comes down to graphics and so we could run this game at full resolution, we did however reduce the graphical details back to "High Quality" in order to run this game fluently. Enabling Turbo mode doesn't bring much extra joy as you can see, the two extra frames per second measured over the whole run doesn't bring any noticeable boost to real life performance.



D.I.R.T. is a lot more GPU demanding and here you can clearly see that disregarding its name the 9600M GT is still a lower-end graphics card, we had to back down the resolution to 800x600 with no Multisampling enabled, graphical details were locked to medium in order to obtain an average framerate of roughly 50fps. Touching MSI's Turbo sense button doesn't bring any extras, just like with TMNF the gain in performance is negligible.