How terrible is t43 for gaming?

[phatxtiger]

I don't know anything about intel GMA 900 but I heard it is not that good. Is it worse than 32mb RAdeon 7500 in t42s?

How will games like HL2 and Doom 3 work on gma 900, 32mb radeon and 64mb radeon?


ps. please don't tell me to look elsewhere for gaming. I want an IBM for its superiority in other aspects. I just want an IBM on which I can also play games.

Thanks.

[K. Eng]

Half Life 2 is more CPU than GPU bound. My best guess is that the GMA900 will run Half Life 2 acceptably at 800x600 at medium/low settings. As for Doom 3, I would say 640x480 low settings... maybe.

Keep in mind that some of the T43's will have Mobility Radeon X300s, which are Radeon 9600 cores with a native PCIe interface. I've got a Radeon 9600 in my desktop (325 MHz Core, 400 MHz Mem) that plays Half Life 2 easily at 1024x768 medium settings DX9, and Doom 3 at 800x600 medium settings.

And you could shell out for a FireGL in the T43p if you really wanted to.

[phatxtiger]

Oh, there will be t43s with radeons? That's great.

It seems like there are only two t43s on the IBM webpage (both with gma 900).

Does anyone know when the current t43s (ones on the website) will be available; when the ones with radeon will be available?

How will radeon x300 operate compared with fireGL?

Thank you,

[K. Eng]

Do a search on the forums for 'T43' and 'TABOOK'

The TABOOK contains the specifications of all the models IBM will ship. Due to a shortage of PCIe GPUs, I would not expect the T43's with discrete graphics to ship in great quantities until later this month or early March.

I don't know how well the FireGL V3200 will perform relative to the X300, but they are both based on the same 4-pipeline, DX9 architecture. The ThinkPad models with FireGL cards tend to have more RAM, which may give them an advantage in games.

[Flightvector]

Make sure that you also consider the thermal efficiency of the copper heatpipes. I don't run games for long periods on my notebook (specs in my sig) because they run a bit too hot for me to be comfortable with in the long term.

I have not reached throttling temperature (88.5 C) like I know some users in this forum have experienced in DX9 games, but I reach nearly 80 Celsius consistently on a DX8 game (Pacific Fighters). I don't think many would be comfortable with that on a P4 since, if I think correctly, it throttles at lower temperatures than the Pentium M, which makes me a bit edgy; a sizeable factor of safety exists from throttling temperature on a T42 at 78 Celsius, but I am questioning the basis on which the apparently increased heat tolerance in the Pentium M was determined.

It seems that when the GPU and CPU are really working, the heatpipes can all but just barely keep up with this increase in thermal output. Maybe this all just baseless concern, but I just want to tell you since this may affect your decision in addition to video memory.

I don't know if the FireGL is any different, but I have the 64Mb MR9600. But you definitely don't want lower than that, I still run my games at relatively low detail and at XGA to get stable and smooth frame rates on my flight sims, and my T42 will not replace my desktop for gaming. Finally, I don't see why a T43 could not possibly run games very well due to its bandwidth capability, but this is something I have yet to see.