How well does Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900 run Age of Myth + Max Payne2?

[JEDI]

Just curious if anyone ran Age of Mythology or Max Payne2 using the GMA 900 video chip?

if so, how well did those game run (ie: fps)? at what res? and what eye candy did you leave out?

 

[Azndude2190]

Intergrated cards normally blow for gaming...so my guess is low(decent performance)and if your lucky at medium

 

[VIAN]

Not sure, but here are good reasons to suspect crappy performance.

1. Intel.
2. Integrated.

 

[mOeeOm]

Originally posted by: VIAN
Not sure, but here are good reasons to suspect crappy performance.

1. Intel.
2. Integrated.

The hate

 

[Marsumane]

It will run the games at playable framerates. Settings? Medium to low area is my guess.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Intel GMA is crap for pretty much all FPSes; you will be hard pressed to get playable performance in Max Payne 2; I'm not sure how demanding Age of Mythologies is.

 

[Genx87]

Usually if it says Intel then it means take last generations lowend and subtract 50% of the performance.

50% of a 5200 ouchy

 

[venk]

Max Payne 2 ran pretty well on my Inspiron 110 (Celery 2.4/512/Intel) at 1024x768. I only got slowdowns at certain areas of the Fun House.

 

[batmanuel]

Those are 3-4 year old game engines, so the GMA might give you halfways decent framerates. If you haven't bought the laptop yet, you might be able to get a version of the Insp. 6000 w/ and X300 mobile pretty cheap if you can hang on until a 40% off coupon comes around again.

 

[stnicralisk]

I had some performance trouble at high setting with my old 4200. I can imagine that integrated == low

 

[JEDI]

i just installed max payne2.

it says i dont have agp acceleration enabled on my gma900?!

i looked thru display. i cant find that option.

how do i enable it?

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Originally posted by: mOeeOm

Originally posted by: VIAN
Not sure, but here are good reasons to suspect crappy performance.

1. Intel.
2. Integrated.

The hate

Its true. Nvidia + Integrated and ATI + integrated is better than Intel + Integrated.

 

[ramulack45]

but, but..

its eXtream

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: JEDI
Just curious if anyone ran Age of Mythology or Max Payne2 using the GMA 900 video chip?

if so, how well did those game run (ie: fps)? at what res? and what eye candy did you leave out?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/chipsets/display/i915g_6.html

Max Payne 2
800x600 medium quality
55 fps

 

[niggles]

so I own a Dell 6000 and am quite interested in similar threads. the 900 GMA frustrates me no end because despite was is written above. It's a pretty great GPU for an integrated solution. Now comes the kicker, Intel is really not so great at supporting the card and I'm still trying to find out why pixel shader 1.1 doesn't work on many games despite the fact that it is Pixel shader 2.0 compliant.
Anyway, on to the question at hand. I don't have Myth so can't test it, but I do have Max Payne 2. I've played it on the desk top, but loaded up on the laptop to see what it would be like. I bumped up the texture quality all the way and there's been no issues with lag yet.
As to the point on your card not having the AGP enabled, that is because the 900 GMA is PCI-Express and I doubt MP2 was able to check for PCI-E.
I've been contemplating starting up a site for the 900GMA on the Inspiron 6000 because of the many issues that could easily be avoided. It's a strong solution for an integrated shared resource GPU that needs to get some post design support to get the sort of respect it deserves.

 

[JEDI]

latest 6000 bios is a08. it includes a bios update to the gma900 (i think a06 had the video bios update).

also, there were new video drivers last month.

 

[niggles]

yeah, the driver update was actually released quite some time ago by Intel, I think it was June. Just took Dell along time to release it was all.
Just ran MP2 again, but this time enable the widescreen 1600 x 1050 resolution 32 bit and still with textures all the way up and it runs fine. The problem is that MP2 widescreen isn't really done all that well... suffice it to say that he looks more like a dwarf than Max Payne.

So back to the Bios point you made. I don't like to flash the bios unless I have to. What did you find better with the new Bios?

edit, and I think I'm missing something here, what is your point on 'video bios'. In fact what is a video bios... isn't that simply the bios?

 

[JEDI]

one of the things the a06 bios updated was the video bios. dont remember what the a07 and a08 improved. but there;s a readme file on dell's support site

 

[niggles]

Interesting, I couldn't find anything on the site about the a06, but I can find things on the internet about it. Seems a06 boned many a laptop so I can understand why they wouldn't list anything. Would you be able to expand on what the video bios update is going to address?

 

[JEDI]

it updates the video bios to:
Intel 915GM Graphics Video BIOS version 1219

but i have no idea what improvements there are.

 

[niggles]

the reports are of black screens on boot up, that the video was simply not responding at all. Interesting that this would occur on a video bios upgrade. Doesn't look to be an issue with the current bios upgrade, so maybe I'll give it a whirl. I have to say that I am finding that a lot of new games liste the 900GMA as incompatible with their games. It seems that they've given up even trying to trouble shoot what appears to be a drivers issues. I mailed Intel on the issue who referred me to Dell. The Dell tech I talked to made some show that he would bring it up with his technical people and they would figure it out. He wasn't overly convincing to me. Unless I see on their site that they are addressing the issue I would go with the idea that unless the game is pixel shader 1.0 or lower it's not going to work.
I'll try the new Bios, if it helps I will post back here.

 

[knive5]

I also have a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, i was wondering if the performance will be better than a radeon 9200. Also i would like to know how to enable AGP for the GMA 900, because some games i play prefer AGP being turned on. Thank you

 

[martinez]

I can tell you that I played AoM with no problems on a Geforce 4 440go chip. Just had to play at 12x10 and turn footprints off, but on high detail. I would imagine the GMA 900 is on par with that.

 

[niggles]

Originally posted by: knive5
I also have a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, i was wondering if the performance will be better than a radeon 9200. Also i would like to know how to enable AGP for the GMA 900, because some games i play prefer AGP being turned on. Thank you

First off you can't enable AGP because it's a PCI-E card, not AGP. Netxt up I know that the GMA 900 is vastuly superior to the the ATI 9000 as I have one on my work Dell Latitude 600D. I loaded up Doom to see what it could do and the ATI 9000 was like a slide show... about one frame every 2 seconds. I loaded Doom on to my Inspiron 6000 and with everything turned down it was actually playable. Same with Half Life 2 with everything turned down... it was actually playable. Now I have to say that I'd prefer not to have to play either on this thing, it wouldn't be great, but it would be playable. I just upgraded from 512 to 1.256 Gigs of RAM in hopes of imporving game play. I can say for sure it vastly improved Battle Field Vietnam. Now I'm going to try Far Cry and see if it made it playable. It was fairly unplayable before so I'm interested to see. I'll post back if it is playable now.

 

[niggles]

ok, I loaded up Far Cry and have been doing some tests. With everything on medium it's fine while you're in doors. Going outside kills the GPU, and I had to drop all the settings onto lowest in order to play it. It's completely playable and still looks great though.