As people are on the go more, it makes sense that they want to be able to play their favorite games on their laptops.  The problem is that most laptops are not designed for ‘real’ gaming. I know … I know … there are “gaming” laptops albeit those 10 pound cinder blocks that are available. I’m talking about a normal laptop that weighs in at less than 7 pounds and has a 16 or 17 inch screen.

First, understand that mobile quad core processors usually run more slowly than mobile dual core processors plus gaming usually doesn’t make use of the extra processors at the slower clock speeds so you won’t notice a significant speed difference for gaming.

Memory is also a factor but most games can only address 4GB of memory so more doesn’t really buy you anything.

So what is the problem?

Graphics and video hardware is the single biggest item that prevents your laptop for being a real gaming machine. Some laptops come with what is called discrete graphics which means they have a separate chip built into the motherboard for accelerating 3D graphics. The problem is that they usually have fewer shader (computational ) units than even a midrange desktop graphics card.  Add that to less bandwidth and slower clock speeds, the performance suffers considerably.  Even if you set your graphics for less intensity, you probably won’t notice much improvement. Installing the most recent drivers available usually helps a little.

The small speakers just can’t give you a truly satisfying gaming experience.  Touch pads and eraser heads don’t work either.

What can you do?

Get a decent wireless mouse that has a scroll wheel and at least two side buttons. Reconfigure your graphics drivers and eliminate all the really fancy stuff like vsync which tries to match the refresh rate to the display rate. Turn it off and the game can paint the frames as fast as it likes. The only problem is if the frame rate is significantly lower than the vertical refresh rate some image tearing may occur. You can also reset the texture quality lower which shouldn’t have much effect on quality with a small screen.

Disabling TSRs like iTunes, adobe and other updaters can free up memory that will increase processing speed.

The last place you can tweak performance in in the game itself. If the game gives you a choice of which DirectX version to use, selecting the lower one and setting all the game options to low should significantly improve performance.