Portable Devices and Heat

Zolgar

Why do laptops have heating issues (especially when running games), but then I see games like Infinity Blade (for example) run on iPhone/iPod touches, plus the plethora of (3)DS and PSP games, and those systems can handle the graphics, without any major heating problems (to my knowledge anyways, can't say I've ever experienced an issue due to heat on any portable device).

 

Can these small devices run these games so well simply due to low resolutions?

Quizzical

Power consumption is heat.  In the process of doing whatever work various electronic components do, they convert electrical energy into heat.

Cell phones, tablets, and so forth release vastly less heat than gaming laptops because they have vastly lower power consumption.  It takes higher power consumption to get higher performance.  Desktops go heavily for the "higher performance" end of that spectrum, while cell phones go heavily for "lower power consumption", and laptops are somewhere in between.

Things like the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP can have much lower power consumption because they offer much lower performance.  Companies that design games for them have to throttle their ideas way back to allow the low performance devices to run the games properly.  The very low monitor resolution is part of it, but that's not the whole thing.

You can get laptops that are very low power and won't have problems with overheating.  AMD's C-50 APU has a TDP of 9 W, for example, and you could design a laptop to safely dissipate that with no fans at all.  That includes the processor, graphics, memory controller, and northbridge, and the rest of the platform is also designed for low power consumption.

To do that, you'll give up a lot of performance, however, and you'll think, hey, this is slow for a laptop.  It will be a lot faster than a 3DS or PSP, though.  A lot of PC games assume that you have higher performance hardware available, and implement fancier effects to take advantage of that than they can do in a 3DS or PSP.

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There's an interesting battle shaping up between x86 and ARM, which are the two main processor architectures in the world today.  x86 is a high performance architecture, typically used in desktops, laptops, workstations, and servers.  ARM is a low power architecture, typically used in cell phones, tablets, and lots of other things that have an embedded processor of some sort that you don't think about.  You can make an ARM Cortex A5-based device with a TDP of a small fraction of a watt.

Intel and AMD are trying to take the high performance x86 architecture and scale down the power consumption.  Both want to put x86 in tablets, and Intel wants to try for cell phones and various small embedded things.  AMD is less ambitious about putting x86 in places where it doesn't fit very well.  Intel has been trying to push Atom into cell phones for years, with no luck so far.

Meanwhile, ARM is trying to scale up performance to make ARM-based laptops.  There have been a few so far, but they flopped.  Microsoft will make Windows 8 for ARM, so they might fare better then.  ARM also needs higher performance for laptops, and they're planning on doing this with their upcoming Cortex A15 core.

Incidentally, Windows 8 might help x86 get into tablets, too.  Right now, you can get x86-based tablets like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152278

But Windows 7 isn't designed for the tablet form factor, so it's awkward.  Windows 8 should improve on that greatly.  Whether it fixes it entirely remains to be seen.

For whatever reason, people expect vastly higher performance from laptops than from tablets.  Get a tablet that is too weak to be much beyond a dinky little toy and people are like, oh look at the cool things it can do.  Put that double that performance level in a netbook and people are disappointed because they expected a functional computer.

neorandom

shitty laptops get hot, they dont have full plate heat sinks and multiple fans

 

buy gaming laptops, from gaming laptop producers like asus, or sager, theyre heavy, their battery life is awfull, they play games on max settings and they vent the heat because they have heat plates(heavy) and multiple fans (sucky battery life).

 

my sager np7282-s1 has a desktop quad core @ 3.6 ghz 12 gigs of ddr3 @ 1333 and crossfire ati gpus, it gets 20 mins on battery (best used as a UPS) but it plays any game out now on max settings with aa and shadows ect all dialed up to max.  and it dont get hot at all =D

psyclum

i remember RAIDING in everquest on a pentium 2 400mhz and 256 megs of ram:) 

it's not the hardware, it's how much "bling" makes it into the game.   people tend to forget how little processing power you REALLY need if you cut out all the bling like AA, partical effect, shadow, dynamic lighting etc...  some game "fake" it very well like using 2.5D rather then true 3D etc...

it's all a matter of what platform you are writing the game for.