29. Display Quality: The Motion Of Gaming

Those who run relatively slow games on the Acer Aspire 5670 won't have any problems. The response times for the high-gloss display are adequate in that case: movements in Oblivion are clean and clear to see. A racing game like Need for Speed Most Wanted is too fast for this display, however. At high speeds the background becomes extremely blurry and smeared, enough so that the game is barely playable. The Asus and HP displays exhibit similar behaviors. Brightness and contrast on the Aspire monitor during gaming is adequate to render dark corners in Oblivion's dungeons or Tomb Raider's ruins. This rendering doesn't scale to fill the entire image field, however. And depending on the resolution settings in effect, you'll also see a black band around the field of play on screen. All three other competitors can scale to fill the entire screen, independently of the resolution settings in effect.

For the Alienware Aurora M7700 the graphics card isn't the only fast system element. The display's response time also attests to the notion that this is a real gaming notebook. In normal test play, we saw absolutely no blurring or smearing on the screen. Only in the racing game Need for Speed Most Wanted did we see any loss of detail in the background, and then only when operating the racers at extreme speeds. Even the darkest nooks and crannies in Tom Raider and Oblivion's dungeons were bright and contrast rich.

The high-gloss surface of the Asus A7J may only work well for slower games, but rendering is bright and contrast rich, and color output is fully saturated. Dark dungeons in Oblivion and dark temple ruins in Tomb Raider are clearly rendered and easy to discern. In this connection, the display mode button that enables switching among multiple display modes (gamma corrected, normal, theater, soft, or vivid) proves pretty practical.

The HP Compaq nx9430 display is subject to sufficient inertia that it's really well-suited only for slower games such as parts of Oblivion or Tomb Raider. Because of persistent blurring and lack of detail, racing games aren't any more fun on this machine than they are on the Aspire or the A7J. But the LCD's high contrast makes it easy to see lots of details even in the darkest oubliettes and deepest of cellars. Color output appears somewhat too pale, however, by comparison with the other notebooks in our test group.