17. Effect Of Powerplay Settings On Frame Rates

As is well known for several notebooks with ATi mobile graphics processors, the user has the option of reducing the clock rates of the core and memory by means of a GUI, thus increasing battery life.

In the case of some graphics card drivers, this GUI can be used to set the clock rates of the graphics core and the video memory to one of three levels.

Of our two test systems, only the Dell Inspiron 9100 had this feature. The connection between the setting and the clock speeds in this device is as follows:

Optimal Performance: 351MHz/297MHz core speed/memory speed; Balanced: 209MHz/182MHz core speed/memory speed; Optimal Battery Life: 120MHz/120MHz core speed/memory speed.

To determine how much the three settings affect performance and thus the frame rate on average, we ran the time demo of Halo and the 1_1_ Tibilis Demo from Splintercell in various screen resolutions with the different Powerplay settings.