Whilst interstate on annual leave I have taken my Panasonic AX2 convertible ultrabook to be my main computing device. Normally, at home I would use my desktop computer with its twin GTX 295 video cards (which are getting a little long in the tooth now for some recent games at 1600p) but I don’t typically require that sort of grunt when I am away from home which isn’t that often anyway.
However, I had the urge to play a little bit of Team Fortress 2 and I figured that it would be a fun little experiment to see if it would run on the humble Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU inside my ultrabook. Definitely not the pinnacle of benchmarked GPUs and not even on the radar for hardcore gamers but may be worth some consideration if you are into some older games that don’t require as much horsepower and you’re not running at higher resolutions.
So, I gave it a shot.
After installing TF2 over the cable internet connection (thank goodness I had it installed here at my folks place before I moved out) I fired it up, joined a server and spectated to see how it would fare.
You know, it actually worked rather well – if anything, I had more of a problem trying to game on a laptop keyboard without a number pad with a different mouse at a fairly low resolution (1366 x 768 compared to 2560 x 1600 on my desktop computer). The frame rates on the automatic settings were quite admirable and there was an absence of any choppiness.
So, I could potentially use it for portable gaming in the future but it might not be the most effective experience.
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