ATI Mobility Radeon 9800: Notebooks Get Next Generation Graphics

Final Words

We have been very satisfied with our MR9800 experience. For quite a while, we have called for high performance graphics options to make their way into the mobile market for those who are willing to trade battery life and heat for added performance. Not everyone who wants mobility also needs long battery life. Notebooks are much more portable than SFF computers, and we finally have a notebook option that is a viable solution for the LAN party crowd.

Additionally, pushing higher performance options requires companies to really think hard about power management. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if the market requires high performance mobile computing, companies will have to build a better mouse trap (or at least a lower power GPU) to grab design wins.

And performance isn't the only factor. The fact that we are seeing the level of compatibility and feature set of the desktop move into the mobile space faster than we've even seen new mid-range and budget parts make it into the market from everyone is very impressive.

We would definitely like to see this, or similar parts, make its way into more notebooks.

The only real complaint that we can levy against ATI is that their notebook drivers are still lagging the desktop. Now that we've seen the hardware catch up, we'd like to see the software follow suit. ATI's new driver every month scheme might not work well for the notebook market (and is arguably not the best thing in general), but pushing notebook vendors to issue quarterly releases that match ATI's desktop counterparts would be a welcome addition to the already incredible setup that ATI is gathering together.

To be fair, we haven't yet seen what NVIDIA is bringing to market on the mobile side. From what we are hearing, they are planning on pushing a lot of power out to the DTR market as well, which should make for very exciting competition. Right now, we'll have to leave the question hanging in the air, much as we left it after NVIDIA launched the 6800 Ultra. Will the competition be able to close the performance/feature set gap? Only time will tell.

Now that all our mobile dreams are coming true, we will have to shift our focus back to begging companies to start offering competitive, performance-oriented, integrated desktop graphics solutions.