X-bit labs

Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi Notebook Review (page 10)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 06/12/2007 | 03:06 PM ]

The Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi and Dell Inspiron XPS M1210 are both equipped with integrated graphics cores, from ATI and Intel, respectively. We tested them in all versions of 3DMark: 3DMark 2001SE Pro, 3DMark 2003 3.6.0, 3DMark 2005 1.2.0 and 3DMark 2006 1.1.0.

3DMark uses a set of 3D scenes running on its own engine to load the graphics subsystem in various ways. Compared with the previous version, 3DMark 2005 uses Shader Model 2.0x/3.0 instead of Shader Model 1.x, provides full compatibility with Shader Model 2.0, includes more complex tests (over a million polygons per each frame), and employs normal maps. 3DMark 2006 brings support for HDR, Uniform Shadow Maps, and multi-core CPUs. It is overall oriented at Shader Model 3.0, but two out of its four graphics tests work within the Shader Model 2.0 framework.

The integrated version of the Radeon X300 is roughly equal to GMA 950 when the notebooks are powered from the mains, but the aggressive power-saving settings of the ATI solution slow the Ferrari notebook down in the battery mode. The graphics cores don’t have the functionality necessary to pass tests that require Shader Model 3.0 support. The Radeon X300 looks much better than GMA 950 in the Batch Size Tests, though.