Thinkpads Forum

I've got Half Life 2 installed on my midtower (Athlon 1.83 GHz + Radeon 9600). I'm curious to see if it'll run on my ThinkPad (Pentium M 1.30 GHz + Radeon 7500).

Anyone tried it on a Radeon 7500? I am wondering if it is playable at 640x480 and DX7 mode.

In any case, I have to wait a few weeks. My USB optical mouse is broken and I've only got the PS2 mouse on my other system.

I've played through to the end of HL2. I play counter-strike source on my a31p as well. I'm running a Penitum 4-M 2.4 Ghz CPU and 1 GB of RAM and using a Wireless G adapter + optical mouse. The video card is the ATi Radeon Mobility FireGL 7800 with 64 Mb of DDR RAM.

I bumped my game settings up to take into account my 3.3 Mbps cable connection by setting "RATE 30000" in the game. Frame rate is limited by the FireGL card. In 640x480 i get about average of 74 fps in the test display rate screen with high rate of 100+ fps and a low rate of 33 fps. Game play was about 56 fps on average. CPU and GPU heat are a factor so I setup 4 additional fans in the ultrabays to cool the case.

Thanks for the details!

I'm thinking that my T40 will barely be able to play at 640x480, as my Radeon 7500 is less powerful than your FireGL and has half the RAM.

Unfortunately the 7500 and 7800 are pretty obsolete as far as GPUs are concerned. No pixel shaders and the BIOS only supports AGP 4x (current is 8x).

I'm installing Half Life 2 on the T40 now... will post details on what happens

a31pguy wrote:Unfortunately the 7500 and 7800 are pretty obsolete as far as GPUs are concerned. No pixel shaders and the BIOS only supports AGP 4x (current is 8x).

I believe that the T41/42s with MR9600 nor FireGLT2s only support those chips at AGP4x as well. Oh well.

I played through the HL demo on my 7XU, it didn't blow me away with silky-smooth framerates of course, but was more than playable (definitely more so than Doom3).

Unbelievable! At 1024x768x32, medium quality DX7, it actually plays VERY well on my T40!

The Radeon 7500 is based on 5 year old technology, and the 32MB of video RAM is pathetic by today's standards, yet HL2 still looks excellent. The water and some other effects don't look as pretty as they do on my desktop (which has a DX9 hardware Radeon 9600), but overall the graphics look nice.

You know after reading through the specs of the chipsets - the i845MP chipset supports "external graphics" - meaning the chipset would support add in/replacable cards. Too bad IBM didn't make upgradable graphics for the thinkpads at that time.

Playing CS:S on my T42 ... 64mb isn't enough for nice high fps with high settings so i play at:

1024x786 ( i hate that ... since only 1400x1050 is sharp) and combined low / medium settings.

Then ill get about an average of 40 fps.
But stil its somethimes unplayable (think about 4 smoke nades + 12 players on screen )

But hey, i have a verry fast workstation ... so why game on your mobile computer?