Of course, you can tell the winner in gaming tests beforehand: the integrated graphics core of the 6003LCi is no match for the discrete graphics processor employed in the TravelMate 803LCi. Anyway, it’s interesting to learn the value of the difference. I checked out the speeds of the notebooks in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:

• 640x480; 16 bit; Lighting:Vertex; Detail:Low; Texture Quality:16 bit; Texture Filter:Bilinear;
• 1024x768; 32 bit; Lighting:Lightmap; Detail:High; Texture Quality:32 bit; Texture Filter:Trilinear.

In the first mode, the 803LCi is 47% faster than the 6003LCi; in the second mode the difference amounts to 73%! You must agree this is a hefty advantage. The results are tabled below:

And diagrammed here:

I used two graphics quality presets in 3DMark 2001 SE: 1) 1024x768, 16-bit color depth, Z-buffer and textures, and 2) 1024x768, 32-bit color depth and textures and 24-bit Z-buffer. The results follow:

So, the Acer TravelMate 803LCi quite naturally wins this gaming test, profiting by the use of a discrete graphics processor RADEON Mobility 9000 with 64 megabytes of dedicated graphics memory. Its performance as reported by 3DMark 2001 SE Pro is about 65% higher (at the low image quality settings) and 73% higher (at the high image quality settings) than that of the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi.

Note also that the latter notebook doesn’t support Game 4, Environment Bump Mapping, Pixel Shader 2.0 and Advanced Pixel Shader tests at all. The 803LCi passed a few tests (Fill Rate, Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader) at roughly the same speed irrespective of the power source.