One area in which these laptops will still fall short in is the refresh rates of the
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non-gaming laptop would include a higher-refresh screen than that, apart from
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they have the power to push frame rates at those numbers.
Iris Xe laptops won’t reach those heights, but if they can push games like CS:GO
to a consistent 100fps or more, anything beyond 60fps is not being shown on
screen. This is potentially a niche concern, and most users reliant on integrated
graphics will be happy they can push 60fps consistently at all, but it begs the
question whether manufacturers eventually will begin adding high-refresh
screens to general-use laptops to accommodate them. Since such screens have
become near-standard in gaming laptops already, they may trickle down to
other categories naturally, like many other technologies have before (and like
we’ve seen with refresh rates in smartphones).
- LOOK OUT, NVIDIA GEFORCE MX (AND SOME GAMING
ULTRAPORTABLES)
This is a lesser concern perhaps, but one worth watching. In the past year, we’ve
reviewed a few laptops that straddle the line between general-use and gaming-
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Envy 17, which packs Nvidia’s GeForce MX 330 GPU. This chip is half a step
between IGPs and discrete gaming GPUs, though much closer to the former.
Photo^ credit:^ Intel