Need your advice in choosing a laptop GPU

[ahmedhassan_92]

Hello Guys! I have a few choices as to which GPU laptop I should get. All the laptops have 8gigs of DDR3 RAM, and are 4th gen. i7s.

So simply, which one is better for pure gaming out of these 4 GPUs:

1. Nvidia Geforce gt740m (4GB)
2. Nvidia Geforce 840m (2GB)
3. ATI Radeon 8750m (2GB)
4. ATI Radeon R7 m265 (2GB)

Any help would be appreciated. I don't want to play games on full HD, 720p is more than enough. The card should last to run newly released games for the next 3-4 years at medium-low settings. Thanks and cheers!

 

[cirdecus]

just google the benchmarks to see which is best. The highest benchmarks are best . I can tell you that the 8750 and 840 are probably at the top of that list and are nearly identical in performance.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

The 840M will be the best choice as it is the most advance. It is also a really good GPU to play games at low to medium: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

 

[ahmedhassan_92]

just google the benchmarks to see which is best. The highest benchmarks are best . I can tell you that the 8750 and 840 are probably at the top of that list and are nearly identical in performance.

Different Benchmarks are showing different results, sadly. I have tried 3 benchmarks and all 3 have a different GPU at #1

 

[ahmedhassan_92]

The 840M will be the best choice as it is the most advance. It is also a really good GPU to play games at low to medium: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

Now we are getting somewhere. This means that gt740m is out of the question, but in case you forgot to read, the gt740m is of the 4gb version. Would that make it any more powerful than the 840m?

 

[Solandri]

The 840M will be the best choice as it is the most advance. It is also a really good GPU to play games at low to medium: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

Now we are getting somewhere. This means that gt740m is out of the question, but in case you forgot to read, the gt740m is of the 4gb version. Would that make it any more powerful than the 840m?

Having 4 GB of VRAM basically means the GPU can handle more textures and bigger textures (pictures to overlay on top of the 3D shapes it draws). A framebuffer for a 1080p render (at 16 million colors) is only 6 MB, so you need very little VRAM to actually render a scene. 3D models (lists of polygon corner coordinates) tend to be less than 1 MB because each additional triangle takes longer to render. So the vast majority of VRAM is used to pre-load and store texture maps. As long as all the textures the game wants to load fits into VRAM, having extra VRAM offers zero performance advantage.

If you're running games at medium settings, most of the texture maps will be a few MB at most (a 1920x1080 texture will be 6 MB, same as the framebuffer, maybe double that for MIP mapping - smaller versions of the same texture for objects which are far away). 4 GB is far in excess of what you'll ever need. Heck, so is 2 GB, and maybe even 1 GB. All that extra VRAM is only really useful if you're running with high or ultra settings with ultra-high textures. So no, I wouldn't consider having 4 GB of VRAM to be an advantage. I'd actually consider it a disadvantage as the laptop will use more power when gaming. It's just marketing people going nuts trying to pad the numbers on the spec sheet.

At this level of GPU, if you've got more than 1-2 GB of VRAM the only technical spec of the VRAM that should concern you is the memory speed. GDDR5 is the current best (fastest). But at this level of GPU I think most systems are going to be shipping with GDDR3. But if one of those laptops comes with GDDR5, that would give it a considerable performance advantage which might not show up in the benchmarks (which are probably from laptops which only had GDDR3).

Look up each of those video cards on notebookcheck. Better yet, see if they've reviewed the specific laptops you're interested in. It is hands down the best site for this sort of comparison, with comprehensive benchmarks, teardowns, and tests. In addition to the benchmarks, they also list the fps of various games on laptops they've tested which use those GPUs. So you can get a sense of the "real world" performance of those GPUs while gaming. I actually wish there was a site as good for desktop CPUs and GPUs.

 

[ahmedhassan_92]

The 840M will be the best choice as it is the most advance. It is also a really good GPU to play games at low to medium: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

Now we are getting somewhere. This means that gt740m is out of the question, but in case you forgot to read, the gt740m is of the 4gb version. Would that make it any more powerful than the 840m?

Having 4 GB of VRAM basically means the GPU can handle more textures and bigger textures (pictures to overlay on top of the 3D shapes it draws). A framebuffer for a 1080p render (at 16 million colors) is only 6 MB, so you need very little VRAM to actually render a scene. 3D models (lists of polygon corner coordinates) tend to be less than 1 MB because each additional triangle takes longer to render. So the vast majority of VRAM is used to pre-load and store texture maps. As long as all the textures the game wants to load fits into VRAM, having extra VRAM offers zero performance advantage.

If you're running games at medium settings, most of the texture maps will be a few MB at most (a 1920x1080 texture will be 6 MB, same as the framebuffer, maybe double that for MIP mapping - smaller versions of the same texture for objects which are far away). 4 GB is far in excess of what you'll ever need. Heck, so is 2 GB, and maybe even 1 GB. All that extra VRAM is only really useful if you're running with high or ultra settings with ultra-high textures. So no, I wouldn't consider having 4 GB of VRAM to be an advantage. I'd actually consider it a disadvantage as the laptop will use more power when gaming. It's just marketing people going nuts trying to pad the numbers on the spec sheet.

At this level of GPU, if you've got more than 1-2 GB of VRAM the only technical spec of the VRAM that should concern you is the memory speed. GDDR5 is the current best (fastest). But at this level of GPU I think most systems are going to be shipping with GDDR3. But if one of those laptops comes with GDDR5, that would give it a considerable performance advantage which might not show up in the benchmarks (which are probably from laptops which only had GDDR3).

Look up each of those video cards on notebookcheck. Better yet, see if they've reviewed the specific laptops you're interested in. It is hands down the best site for this sort of comparison, with comprehensive benchmarks, teardowns, and tests. In addition to the benchmarks, they also list the fps of various games on laptops they've tested which use those GPUs. So you can get a sense of the "real world" performance of those GPUs while gaming. I actually wish there was a site as good for desktop CPUs and GPUs.

Thank you so much for that elaborate response! Just one more thing, could you kindly give your opinion on the Radeon R7 m265 card?

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

The 840M will be the best choice as it is the most advance. It is also a really good GPU to play games at low to medium: http/www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html

Now we are getting somewhere. This means that gt740m is out of the question, but in case you forgot to read, the gt740m is of the 4gb version. Would that make it any more powerful than the 840m?

Having 4 GB of VRAM basically means the GPU can handle more textures and bigger textures (pictures to overlay on top of the 3D shapes it draws). A framebuffer for a 1080p render (at 16 million colors) is only 6 MB, so you need very little VRAM to actually render a scene. 3D models (lists of polygon corner coordinates) tend to be less than 1 MB because each additional triangle takes longer to render. So the vast majority of VRAM is used to pre-load and store texture maps. As long as all the textures the game wants to load fits into VRAM, having extra VRAM offers zero performance advantage.

If you're running games at medium settings, most of the texture maps will be a few MB at most (a 1920x1080 texture will be 6 MB, same as the framebuffer, maybe double that for MIP mapping - smaller versions of the same texture for objects which are far away). 4 GB is far in excess of what you'll ever need. Heck, so is 2 GB, and maybe even 1 GB. All that extra VRAM is only really useful if you're running with high or ultra settings with ultra-high textures. So no, I wouldn't consider having 4 GB of VRAM to be an advantage. I'd actually consider it a disadvantage as the laptop will use more power when gaming. It's just marketing people going nuts trying to pad the numbers on the spec sheet.

At this level of GPU, if you've got more than 1-2 GB of VRAM the only technical spec of the VRAM that should concern you is the memory speed. GDDR5 is the current best (fastest). But at this level of GPU I think most systems are going to be shipping with GDDR3. But if one of those laptops comes with GDDR5, that would give it a considerable performance advantage which might not show up in the benchmarks (which are probably from laptops which only had GDDR3).

Look up each of those video cards on notebookcheck. Better yet, see if they've reviewed the specific laptops you're interested in. It is hands down the best site for this sort of comparison, with comprehensive benchmarks, teardowns, and tests. In addition to the benchmarks, they also list the fps of various games on laptops they've tested which use those GPUs. So you can get a sense of the "real world" performance of those GPUs while gaming. I actually wish there was a site as good for desktop CPUs and GPUs.

Thank you so much for that elaborate response! Just one more thing, could you kindly give your opinion on the Radeon R7 m265 card?

The 265 will probably not even be close to the performance of the 840m. Also, the 4GB of VRAM will not help that much. VRAM is usually only used for displaying on higher res displays like 4K or 2K. Here is a benchmark for the 265 for your needs. http/www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R7-M265.109394.0.html