(Original thread's start was years ago, and something prompted a recycle . . )
"Again today (the day I posted this in the ME-2 Tech Forum), we have seen another complaint from someone without any video card at all in the laptop. Meanwhile, the influence of the "Netbook" class of computing devices might be what is diluting the quality of the laptop / notebook offerings in the marketplace. The upper range of Netbooks is already close to an overlap in performance with the low-price mobile PCs, and many manufacturers are choosing to keep on using older, lower-priced chipsets in their laptops to keep their laptops' costs down."
Netbooks' video devices are all strictly onboard chips, and at present, all are using the outdated IGPs that Intel first offered about five years ago. Too many current laptops with Intel chipsets are still using the same old-model IGPs that those netbooks do. Within the last three years, Intel had finally started to include most of the features and functions that ATI and nVIDIA had been including in IGPs for the past 8-10 years. Not that any of the IGPs from any of the three were truly game-capable, just that it was possible to at least "preview" what a game might look like on such a chip.
Recknamoken added a comment to my video graphics rankings article, and I answered. I didn't intend to support IGPs or mobile devices as suitable for use as or in a proper gaming platform system.
The influence of $200 - $250 Netbooks extends also to causing a reduction in the numbers of laptops that would have included an actual, discrete, video card instead of an onboard video chip, because that adds quite a bit to the cost of a laptop, and the average cost of those offered has been lowered generally. There are fewer laptops available for purchase that have real video cards in them.
Cost-cutting has also affected the cooling capacity of those laptops that really do have video cards, and how many more of them get hot too quickly because the heat sinks are too small, and the cooling fans are too ineffectual. Admittedly, there had already been a tendency on the part of laptop designers to shortchange the heat sink hardware, because it adds to the weight of the PC, and laptop designers are devoted to the gods of light weight and long battery life, both being elements heavily impacted by high performance add-on video cards.
If all laptop makers adhered to the same performance standards for add-on video, game developers would be more inclined to consider offering tech support to the laptop PCs, but each designer seems to have his (or her) own standards for what level of performance degradation he / she will will apply in the name of battery life or total weight. Compared to the ATI and nVIDIA reference designs, too few even follow the (typically 10 % reduction in performance compared to the matching desktop card version) recommended specifications. The end result is variations of 10% more performance loss, to as much as a total of 30% dilution.
(Because I do not include any laptop video devices in the lists of ranked cards, and EA doesn't even pretend to support any of them, I tend to try and ignore this type PC as much as possible.)
The immediate answer is that a small percentage of (mostly) expensive laptops can upgrade. Most cannot. And those with onboard video chips are never among those with a video upgrade option.Posted by Ritalin
I got this game for my brother, but he has a laptop that does not appear to have a compatible video card. Does anyone know if laptops can typically upgrade their video cards or is he just out of luck?
He has an Acer TravelMate 4672WLMi. It has an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.
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