3D graphics performance
We've had to drop all the way back to 3DMark03 in order to find an appropriate graphics benchmark for the Intel integrated graphics in these laptops. Intel claims a 50% performance gain for the GMA 950 over the GMA 900. Is that a fair claim?

The ThinkPad's GMA 950 is indeed about 50% faster than the Sharp's GMA 900. Of course, that's not really anything to brag about. Both of these systems utterly crawled through the Mother Nature scene that made the GeForce 5800 Ultra infamous back in the day. Intel's graphics solutions may meet the minimum specifications for a DirectX graphics processor, but they are a far cry from even the low-end discrete graphics solutions from ATI and NVIDIA.

Intel's graphics are acceptable for some games with relatively low horsepower requirements. For me, one of the most important games in that category is Guild Wars, so I decided to test it. I used FRAPS to record frame rates over a series of five 60-second gameplay sessions in which my ranger character was running around outside of Ascalon, kicking some tail. The game's terrain quality was set to high, reflections to default, texture quality to high, and shadow quality to medium. Post-process effects were enabled.

The ThinkPad T60 delivers higher average frame rates than the Sharp, but the median low frame rates remain the same. Despite the fact that the low frame rates aren't improved, playing the game did feel smoother to me on the ThinkPad.