I think that ranking laptops can take many guises. For instance, whose got the best CPU or screen (contrast ratio + viewing angles), most quiet, etc... Only a good technically assessed laptop will stand the test of time. You might not want to play a 3D game or learn 3D animation right when you first buy it i.e. year-1, but what about year-2 or 3? That's the time when you've settled down with the software & browser you use and now want to add a tiny bit of fun in your life.
If you bought a Class-2 GPU now, then 1 or 2 years from now, you'll have to spend another $1000+ on a new laptop and for what, a cool & trending $50 game? Very disproportionate how a $50 game can control a $1000 expenditure. But it's not just the game that's to blame. Don't forget Windows which will definitely make matters worst i.e. making your current laptop feel like a piece of junk as time passes. Now it'd seem browsers are at it too. The inefficiency in HTML, Java and Flash rendering, means that browsers require a lot of RAM, CPU and GPU resources to display the information you requested on-screen. (The jackass who made the website is mostly to blame though. He/she overloaded it with features without a care as to how this will impact on your laptop or smaller device). This large resource-requirement problem is present in both Firefox and IE means that with time you'll feel that your laptop is no longer top-notch. If you don't believe me, go try right now a webpage overloaded with Flash adverts & video players and whilst all of them are playing simultaneously, check the CPU spikes in Task Manager :: Process-tab.
Here's an experiment I did myself. UK Channel4's News video player. They do such a bad job with the Flash that it sucks 94% of my 2.13GHz dual core CPU. And obviously, at that level my CPU fan also goes mad and I'm now in a noisy environment. Youtube videos only suck about 52-64% of my CPU which I believe is fine. Playing a video from my hard-drive (i.e. offline video, traditional avi) is much less than that. I'm attaching a picture of that Channel4 experiment, I told them to fix but they did absolutely nothing, so here's it is:
HTML5, new CSS and new crappy Flash are all in the pipeline, expect more abuse by noob 'developers' who shouldn't be using such technologies in the first place!
Anyway, without any more delays, i present you my video: "Ranking Laptops based on their GPU."
If you have any questions, post them below. Thanks for watching.
