(This guide is the culmination of several months of answering questions about why XIV won't run on this or that laptop, and what to look for when buying a laptop for gaming purposes. Great thanks to notebookcheck.com for their fantastic and thorough comparison charts, and to tomshardware.com for providing at least a "road map" chart for translating desktop GPUs to laptop ones)

Introduction: (spoilered for tl;dr)
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Laptops are made, by design, to run with a much lower power signature. If they weren't they'd not only burn up their battery power in a few minutes but they'd also literally burn! Because of this, directly comparing laptop parts to desktop parts, especially when they have the same model numbers, is useless. Even trying to compare two parts in the same family is difficult, because you have to factor in that the rest of the computer itself is a completely different design.


Mobile Processors: (spoilered for tl;dr)
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Laptop CPUs are designed to run on less power and at a much slower clock rate than their desktop cousins, so that they can use less battery power and put out less heat. Generally within the same CPU "family", the performance will be 15-20% lower than the desktop CPU with the same model number (that is, if the models match up at all).

Ex.: Intel's Core i7-920 "Bloomfield" vs. i7-920XM "Clarksfield"
Cores/Threads: 4 cores / 8 threads
Clock Speed: 2.66GHz (2.93 turbo) vs. 2.0GHz (3.2 turbo)
Wattage: 130W vs. 55W
3DMark06 Score: 4728 vs. 3816

Note that the turbo speed on the mobile version is higher. This actually helps out laptops a lot by spinning down a couple CPU cores that aren't in use when doing basic stuff (web, email, word processing, listening to music). Also, the laptop 920 runs its memory in dual-channel mode so that the machine doesn't have to use extra power.

For FFXIV's purposes, the minimum specifications are about the same. A mobile Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2 will run the game, but you'll want to go for one with a slightly higher clock (2.4GHz) to offset the power-sipping design.

Mobile Graphics: (spoilered for tl;dr)
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This is where the real problems occur when trying to play demanding games on a laptop. Manufacturers know that the main use for laptops is for working while traveling. So most of the time they'll simply use a integrated graphics processor (IGP) such as Intel's GMA4500 or ATI's Radeon 4200. Sometimes you'll see something slightly better like a GeForce G210M or a Mobility Radeon HD 4350, or even something designed for graphic design rather than gaming (like a NVidia Quadro or ATI FireGL/FirePro), which only makes things even more confusing.

As you move up the laptop price ladder you'll start to see familiar models numbers, just like with the CPUs. And like the CPUs there's a performance dropoff. Here's a relevant comparison to those of us familiar with the specs for FFXIV:

Ex.: NVidia's GeForce 9600GSO vs. GeForce 9600M GT
Wattage: 59W vs. 23W (
Core Clock: 550MHz vs. 500MHz (powers down to 120MHz at idle)
Memory Clock: Both 800MHz
Shader Clock: 1375MHz vs. 1250MHz
Memory Interface: 192bit vs. 128bit
Memory: 384MB GDDR3 vs. 512MB GDDR2 (base amounts)

The desktop 9600 family is the baseline for XIV, but because of its power-saving design, narrow memory interface and slower memory the laptop version falls far short of the minimum specifications. As you move into the newer GPU models, you'll see the model number start to drop down as well like you do with desktop ones. The 9600M GT has been rebadged over the years as the GT 120M and GT 220M, and got redesigned as the GT 320M. Even with a newer design that's slightly faster and closer to the Fermi chips, this new GPU is only a few steps above IGP.

So the real question is what is the line where laptop GPUs become good enough to handle the demands of FFXIV? Let's go to the chart..



The two red circles are the first time our baseline cards appear in the list, and those two are fairly old GPUs. So it's pretty safe to assume we can work up the chart from here and extend out to include older models:

For NVidia: GeForce "Go" 8800M GTX or equivalent (9800M GTS, GTS 150M, GTX 260M-96core, GTS 360M w/ GDDR3)
For ATI/AMD: Mobility Radeon HD 3850 or better (4830, 5750)