For years, the term laptop gaming usually meant firing up a spine-tingling session of Solitaire, or if you were feeling really adventurous, FreeCell. It's true that laptop computers have been able to play games that don't have eye-popping 3D graphics in them. But if you've wanted to play a game like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 on your laptop, you were pretty much out of luck—until now. nVidia's latest mobile graphics processor unit, the GeForce Go 6800, improves mobile 3D performance considerably over its predecessor, the GeForce Go 5700, and brings full-bore gaming mayhem to the mobile computing set.

The GeForce Go 6800 has 12 pixel pipes, three times the number found in the Go 5700. The 6800's overall performance will vary by implementation. Higher clock rates mean it generates more heat and consumes more power, so laptop makers use different clock speeds, depending on the targeted power consumption and the laptop's ability to dissipate heat. The Go 6800 includes nVidia's PureVideo technology, which adds video-specific features like MPEG-2 decode acceleration, Microsoft Windows Media HD decode acceleration, advanced motion adaptive deinterlacing, driver support for HDTV resolutions (1,280-by-720 and 1,920-by-1,080), and 3:2 pull-down correction for watching DVD movies.

We tested a VoodooPC Envy laptop stocked with a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 1GB of system memory, and the Intel 915 chipset. The GeForce Go 6800 GPU and its memory were clocked well below their peak settings. So we gathered our first set of test data at that clock rate, and then used the nVidia driver's clock optimizer to determine the best engine/memory clock speeds. We completed a second set of tests using these more aggressive settings and encountered no instability issues. We tested with three graphics-intensive games: Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Far Cry.

On our tests, the Go 6800 was able to keep things moving smoothly in all three test games at a resolution of 1,280-by-1,024, with frame-rates staying between 50 and 60 fps at both clock settings. When we added two types of more sophisticated and demanding filtering—antialiasing and anisotropic filtering—frame rates dipped into the 40s, which isn't ideal, but is still playable. We did all of our testing with the laptop connected to AC power. You wouldn't get much battery-based running time with this GPU (and the CPU) at full-tilt in a 3D game.

If you want to take your gaming habit with you on the road, then a laptop powered by nVidia's GeForce Go 6800 will let you enjoy all the latest games with almost all of the eye candy. Just don't wander too far from an electrical socket. For more about the GeForce Go 6800, see ExtremeTech's preview.

Benchmark Tests
Click here to view the nVidia GeForce Go 6800 benchmark test results