AMD A10-4600M Laptop

Just a note: laptop integrated graphics are now damn impressive.

A buddy of mine just picked up a new laptop for his kid. He didn't want to spend more than $600 and wanted to be able to do some gaming on it. I poked around a bit and pointed him to something running an A10-4600M. It's a decent quad-core CPU paired up with a GPU that is roughly the equivalent of a Radeon 7470. Nothing spectacular, but pretty rad for integrated and perfectly acceptable for 768p

After it showed up from Amazon yesterday I took it home to set it up for him and loaded up some Team Fortress 2 to play on it. At the thing's 768p native resolution, 0xAA/4xAF, max in-game settings, I'm seeing a solid 45-60fps. A bit better than Xbox 360 gaming is now available on dirt-cheap laptops. Just thought it was worthy of note.

I'm slapping Metro 2033 on it now to see how it does with a bit more stressful of game.

You'd be surprised.

Metro 2033: Dropped to 720p, low settings, DX9 mode. 25-40fps. Is it amazing? Nope. It still looks and runs a bit better than Metro on the 360 and impressive for a laptop that costs less than my iPad. I think that's the most demanding game I have in my Steam library, which paints a pretty nice picture. Average games in maybe three years will be as demanding as Metro 2033, which is at the border of acceptable performance. The thing will be physically falling apart before it is useless for current gaming of the time. Most modern stuff and for the next year at least, the kid will be able to leave it at native 768p, hit the Medium Settings button, and have a pleasant 45fps experience on his laptop.

I call that a win.