AMD seems willing to barely compete at most, leaving NVIDIA to produce equally lazy parts like the GeForce GTX 480M.

The state of modern high-end mobile graphics is pitiful, and 'good enough' just isn't going to cut it anymore. Now's as good a time as any to reiterate what we said back when we initially reviewed the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5870: AMD needs to get their act together.

Only the Clevo X7200 is able to pull playable framerates across the board, but it also costs three times what the Envy 17 does. We're near the top of the line in mobile graphics here, but the gulf in performance going from mobile to desktop graphics is absolutely tremendous. Lest NVIDIA get cocky, it should be noted that the Quadro 5000M doesn't fare that much better. Once we start pushing the GPU at our 'Ultra' settings, the weaknesses of AMD's mobile line-up are finally revealed. Unfortunately it seems like our 'High' preset is near the peak of what the 5850 can do. As we're often keen to point out, though, again you can see the major difference in performance going from mainstream-class to enthusiast-class graphics in a notebook: there's no middle ground here.

In every case but StarCraft II, the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 is able to produce smooth performance at the Envy 17's native resolution, and even in that case it's still fairly playable. The AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 shouldn't have too much of a problem with our gaming suite at these settings, even at the notebook's 1080p native resolution.

We'll start taxing the Envy 17 at our 'High' preset.

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