GDC 2007: Intel Laptop Gaming TDK Points to Gaming Focused More on Notebooks in the Future

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Intel representatives presented Intel's Laptop Gaming TDK, and what was shown was impressive.

The Laptop Gaming TDK is a development kit for game designers to use to basically target notebook gamers. The notebook market has grown tremendously over the past few years while the gaming community has largely ignored it. Gaming notebooks have been released and since ATI's ground-breaking Mobility Radeon 9600 gaming on the notebook has been seen as a possibility, but Intel is looking to differentiate it.

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The Laptop Gaming TDK aims to allow developers to optimize games for play on notebooks, specifically on the battery and wireless internet connections.

It does this by focusing on what the major drains on the battery are and the impact software can have on battery life. Since most of the optimization that can be done on the hardware level has been, they suggested a move to more efficient games.

The TDK is not Intel-specific, but is free and open to use on any vendor's hardware. It allows the developer to detect if the hardware the game is running on is a notebook, but beyond that to read battery life, wireless signal strength, CPU load, and more, and to adjust performance on the fly accordingly. This includes reducing resolution, reducing video detail, and making other allowances to maintain playable performance while improving battery life.

What was particularly interesting was the attention to wireless signal strength. Understanding that notebooks are used chiefly on the battery - and without a hard network connection - the wireless connection quality becomes essential when playing online games. The presenters suggested games that could automatically save your progress if the battery was going low or if the wireless signal was dropping rapidly.

Laptop Gaming TDK at work in Half Life 2 Mobile Mod (view large image)

Intel demonstrated examples of their toolkit, including the Mobile Mod for Half-Life 2, as well as the battery life monitor in RoboBlitz (running on Unreal Engine 3), and Garage Games' Torque game engine. The Korean MMORPG Silkroad also makes use of the toolkit, letting the user know when the battery is below 30%. According to the presenters, integrating the toolkit into Valve's Source engine took just three hours.

Korean game Silkroad using Laptop Gaming TDK (view large image)

This bodes very well for us as notebook gamers. While there's generally a stigma attached to gaming on the battery, Intel is taking us seriously with this toolkit and their G965, and widespread adoption of the toolkit can only be positive.

Laptop Gaming TDK at work in Race Driver 3 Mobile Mod (view large image)

An amusing aside to the presentation was Windows Vista's presence. In their three game tests checking CPU load and battery life, one of the games refused to run in Vista. More than that, Vista's power draw in games was consistently higher than XP's. Where XP gave a lot of latitude for improving battery life, Vista gave substantially less.

 

If you would like more information on the Laptop Gaming TDK you can visit Intel's site here to download the presentation given today at the GDC 2007 conference.

 

Very Interesting!
It's great to see developers are trying to cater towards notebook gamers rather than only desktops.
The TDK would do great for online games like World of Warcraft .
Nice Post.

 

Good idea! Now lets see it be implemented!

 

There's a catch-22 with gaming and battery life of course, the higher resolution you play at and more graphical detail you choose, the worse battery life will be (if you view the Intel presentation you will see some graph analysis of that).

I think if you really want to do hours of serious gaming on a laptop, you'll be plugged in anyway so the TDK will only help so much. However, when wireless strength is important in a game it's great to have a heads up display of that.

And for those times when you are stuck with only battery to go on, this TDK will definitely be a nice to have. If nothing else it's great that notebook gamers are getting more R E S P E C T from both software and hardware developers.

 

That's quite true.
If I were to consider gaming on a notebook, I would definitely hesitate on gaming while on battery power. The best solution would still have it plugged in.

I definitely have to agree with Andrew on the wireless part. It's great to know just how strong your signal is, this is extremely crucial for online gamers. And I love the thought that it autosaves when the wireless signal strength drops dramatically.

It's certainly a great idea. Nice to see Intel is helping developers cater more for notebook gamers .

 

What really frustrated me was how empty the seminar for it was, because it's clearly a major step in the right direction and widespread adoption would benefit us all. No one's interested in "hey, we'll change things around under the hood to make notebook gaming more enjoyable," especially judging by the response to this article.

Everyone just wants more frames per second. :|

 

Well extending battery life for notebook gaming doesn't quite have the flashy appeal of DX10 graphics. Anyways, Intel already announced this initiative last year and they are presenting the implementation now, so it didn't have a draw that a solid physical product announcement would have.

 

it seems, that vista will not be used very widely until sp1 - too many small problems.