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GMA950 isn't that bad actually.

A

ArchAngel777

Diamond Member
I purchased a nice cheap acer laptop (14") with GMA950 GPU and I was pleasently surprised that it ran even WoW pretty darn good. Of course, I had to lower ever in game option and opitmization, but the game ran decently (15 lowest, 30avg -fps) in the congested cities and it ran real smooth outside hunting (40+). This was at 800 X 600 resolution. I just wanted to give others a heads up on it. One thing to note, that the GMA950 Vista driver is terrible... I removed Vista from the laptop and installed XP Pro on it instead. Once I did that, even fairly modern games were quite playable.

With that said, I am extremely happy with my cheapo laptop purchased. I wanted a small laptop (14") that was thin, light and quite compact, and the Acer 3680-2022 did the trick. Has a Celeron 430 (1.73 Ghz, 512mb ram, 80gb HDD, etc...) for $399 and I purchased a 1GB module sodimm and slammed it in there for 1.5gb... Again, couldn't be happier with my purchase for less than $500. Works perfect for travel and battery life watching movies was around 2 hours and 25 minutes with a 6 cell small battery. Screen looks great, keyboard feels nice. Internal wireless A/G, 4in1 media card reader.
 
hey man i know exactly what you're talking about. I got a inspiron dell 1501 for $533 including taxes.

* AMD Sempron 3500+ (1.8GHz/512Kb)
* 15.4" Ultrasharp WXGA display
* 512GB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz (1 DIMM)
* ATI Xpress 1150 256MB HyperMemory (Integrated graphics)
* 60GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
* 24x CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
* 6-cell 53 WHr lithium-ion battery
* Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
* Dell 1390 802.11g Mini Wireless Card

its a little heavy but its 3 hour and 16 min battery makes up for it. Its the same design as the 1505 only without the extras so i know the design isnt cheap and it runs very cool. The processor has cool n quit too.

for surfing the net and watching movies its great. I probably use my laptop more than my desktop.

I think urs could run ubuntu better though

 
I think urs could run ubuntu better though
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Compiz runs great on Ubuntu with a GMA950 because of the drivers. Way better than having an ATI or Nvidia card. And if you dont know what compiz is, its a 3D desktop environment which runs on top of gnome, kde, xfce and some other window managers. Has all the 3d effects that vista has and then some without needing a beefy gpu.
 
It's not horrible. I remember i used to play CS on a non ati or nvidia card back in the day. I couldn't turn up the resolution, but it still worked fine.
 
Update:

Lord of the Rings Online = Extremely playable on GMA950. The engine scales far better than WoW. I was running 1280 X 720 @ very low settings in LOTRO and was getting a solid 60+ FPS. For those wondering, GMA950 is up for the task for that new game and it looks great. WoW set on low settings looks pretty bad and runs pretty bad (30-40) but LOTRO looks pretty good with low settings and runs very smooth (60+).

Hopefully you guys find this information useful.
 
The Radeon X200M I have in my Compaq isn't very impressive actually. Although I'm glad to hear good things about GMA 950.
 
One of my friends has a Core Duo laptop with the GMA950 and it actually ran Need for Speed: Most Wanted, although it was on the verge of unplayable. Sure, this was at the lowest settings at a low resolution, but the game still looked pretty good.
 
I have a Macbook and it also has the 950 chipset. I can run Warcraft 3, C&C Generals, Dungeon Siege, and Quake III fine at 1024x768 (at lowest settings). Very playable, especially during those long hours of studying for finals in the library.
 
Originally posted by: Gartseff
800x600 isn't all that bad for people (me) who've lived their lives playing games on a 640x480i SDTV

My Macbook 2 GHz C2D 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM is coming soon and I'm confident the few games I play will be smooth enough for me.
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Its bad when you consider its on an LCD that isnt 800x600 causing the picture to as ugly as sin. native res on the lowest settings wouldnt bother me that much but running non native no way.
 
Originally posted by: VisionxOrb
Originally posted by: Gartseff
800x600 isn't all that bad for people (me) who've lived their lives playing games on a 640x480i SDTV

My Macbook 2 GHz C2D 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM is coming soon and I'm confident the few games I play will be smooth enough for me.
Click to expand...

Its bad when you consider its on an LCD that isnt 800x600 causing the picture to as ugly as sin. native res on the lowest settings wouldnt bother me that much but running non native no way.
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LCD's have come a long way since non-native scaling rez. Sure, native will always look better on an LCD, but the it isn't like it was 2-3 years ago. Besides, you can use 1:1 pixel mapping if it bothers you that much, it will just shrink the screen slightly.

But in any case, using GMA950 games isn't for eye candy, it is for functionality. Everyone knows that if you want to play games with eye candy, you purchase a $2,000+ gaming laptop.

But in any case, my latest update was to report that I can play the game at my monitors native resolution with LOTR: Online a game that was just released. Impressive to say the least...
 
Originally posted by: ArchAngel777
Update:

Lord of the Rings Online = Extremely playable on GMA950. The engine scales far better than WoW. I was running 1280 X 720 @ very low settings in LOTRO and was getting a solid 60+ FPS. For those wondering, GMA950 is up for the task for that new game and it looks great. WoW set on low settings looks pretty bad and runs pretty bad (30-40) but LOTRO looks pretty good with low settings and runs very smooth (60+).

Hopefully you guys find this information useful.
Click to expand...

Playable on some low settings yes. Turn it up a notch and not the same case.

It does play just fine though.
 
Originally posted by: BladeVenom
Originally posted by: ADDAvenger
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
gaming at 800x600 ..welcome to 1997.
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Quite true, but the point is that it can be done.
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But WoW came out in 2004.
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How long has GMA 950 been with us? FWIW, I can play CnC Renegade at 1280x800 with everything turned all the way up, and there's never any major slowdowns. Granted, we're talking about a game from 2002, but it does work perfectly.
 
You're talking about playing a 3 year old game (that wasn't demanding to begin with) at lowest settings, at a non native 800x600 res. That's not "isn't that bad".. it's terrible. Even my Intel Extreme Graphics 2 runs wow at 10fps at 1280x800 with all settings turned down and 16 bit color.
 
Originally posted by: mercanucaribe
You're talking about playing a 3 year old game (that wasn't demanding to begin with) at lowest settings, at a non native 800x600 res. That's not "isn't that bad".. it's terrible. Even my Intel Extreme Graphics 2 runs wow at 10fps at 1280x800 with all settings turned down and 16 bit color.
Click to expand...

LOL, I swear, the intelligence of this place varies so much.

Chew on this for a while - I updated my thread with a game that came out in 2007 that runs just fine! Wow, so where are you pulling this 2004 crap?

This is integrated graphics we are talking about... What do you expect? Blah, why bother... Waste of words.
 
Originally posted by: ArchAngel777
Originally posted by: mercanucaribe
You're talking about playing a 3 year old game (that wasn't demanding to begin with) at lowest settings, at a non native 800x600 res. That's not "isn't that bad".. it's terrible. Even my Intel Extreme Graphics 2 runs wow at 10fps at 1280x800 with all settings turned down and 16 bit color.
Click to expand...

LOL, I swear, the intelligence of this place varies so much.

Chew on this for a while - I updated my thread with a game that came out in 2007 that runs just fine! Wow, so where are you pulling this 2004 crap?

This is integrated graphics we are talking about... What do you expect? Blah, why bother... Waste of words.
Click to expand...

He's talking about WoW

For your information, CnC Generals is more demanding than Renegade (and probably about as demanding as WoW), and it runs perfectly. Also, there's an option for 1024x768, thank you very much 😛 Also, I understand that Generals was something like the Oblivion of its day, using such advanced things as physics and all.

Anyway, point is that you can in fact game on such things as n00bish as integrated graphics, even the lowly GMA 950. Oooh, next time I upgrade I'm going to have to get one with that X1250 graphics core (the X700 derived one), man, I bet my games will just fly with that puppy! 😛
 
Why is it that integrated graphics are able to work so well? Is it because the new c2d processors are powerful enough to act like a vid card or does the CPU even get used for integrated graphics?
 
Originally posted by: bigal40
Why is it that integrated graphics are able to work so well? Is it because the new c2d processors are powerful enough to act like a vid card or does the CPU even get used for integrated graphics?
Click to expand...

The CPU works in conjunction with the integrated graphics circuitry found on the northbridge. So the better CPU certainly helps, but only so much since CPU graphics processing is really slow (look at the CPU tests in 3dMarkxx).
 
Originally posted by: Brainonska511
Originally posted by: bigal40
Why is it that integrated graphics are able to work so well? Is it because the new c2d processors are powerful enough to act like a vid card or does the CPU even get used for integrated graphics?
Click to expand...

The CPU works in conjunction with the integrated graphics circuitry found on the northbridge. So the better CPU certainly helps, but only so much since CPU graphics processing is really slow (look at the CPU tests in 3dMarkxx).
Click to expand...

GMA950 and 3000 don't support hardware T&L, so that's handled by the CPU. I don't know how intensive this is though, so having a faster CPU may not affect this much at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMA_950#Co...son_of_GMA_graphics_cores_and_chipsets
 
Originally posted by: ADDAvenger
Originally posted by: Brainonska511
Originally posted by: bigal40
Why is it that integrated graphics are able to work so well? Is it because the new c2d processors are powerful enough to act like a vid card or does the CPU even get used for integrated graphics?
Click to expand...

The CPU works in conjunction with the integrated graphics circuitry found on the northbridge. So the better CPU certainly helps, but only so much since CPU graphics processing is really slow (look at the CPU tests in 3dMarkxx).
Click to expand...

GMA950 and 3000 don't support hardware T&L, so that's handled by the CPU. I don't know how intensive this is though, so having a faster CPU may not affect this much at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMA_950#Co...son_of_GMA_graphics_cores_and_chipsets
Click to expand...

The X3100 (which is what Santa Rosa uses) has hardware T&L.
 
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