Thinkpads Forum

I recently purchased a 2623D6U with the X1300 video card and I am curious about what kind of games you can play on this system. My preferences run to more strategy style games like Civilization (but not SimCity).

Being very new to the PC world (after years with Macs) I was hoping that someone could give me some basic guidance.

TIA

Many games require a minimum of 32mb, you are working with 64mb and would be able to pass through many games so far, but not so sure about future games. By the next few years most of them will require a 256mb, but you should be good for a number of good graphic games out there currently.

Nowadays, a 128MB vid card is recommended for most games, especially for FPS like Brothers in Arms, Battlefield 2 and Half-life 2. FEAR probably has that as a minimum since it is possibly the most graphics intensive games.

The X1300 you have should be able to handle most games. You'll most likely be playing on low to medium settings though. Newer games like Civ4 and Warhammer 40K should hold up pretty well. An older game like Homeworld 2 should be pretty sweet looking I think. Oblivion will probably be a bit too intensive though.

Hope this helps.

I did a search of the T60 forum for "gaming" and came up with this:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=23234

Oh yea forgot to mention, you would need to run the games on low settings and will handle most of the current games in that configuration.

jtlau wrote:FEAR probably has that as a minimum since it is possibly the most graphics intensive games.

Minimum is 64, recommended is 256, and yes it does have great graphics

ThinkPad wrote:

jtlau wrote:FEAR probably has that as a minimum since it is possibly the most graphics intensive games.

Minimum is 64, recommended is 256, and yes it does have great graphics

Sweet. Guess it'll be playable on the 2623D7U I'm getting.

jtlau wrote: An older game like Homeworld 2 should be pretty sweet looking I think. Oblivion will probably be a bit too intensive though.

Homeworld... you've fanned the flames of my memory. I'll have to dig that out and give it a try. That game was a lot of fun!

BTW: Oblivion isn't too bad. I play it on the V5200 with PowerPlay turned *on* and it does OK. I can't remember the res or anything but I got the impression that it didn't require the kind of mustard that new FPSs require.

FEAR is another story entirely. I'm still trying to get all the effects turned on in that game because it really does look nice, but with all the eye candy on it drags, even on an overclocked V5200. It's fine if you turn down some of the special effects though.

-darren

I'm currently (kind of) playing FEAR on my T60p with the V5200. The previous 3-d game I played before this was Pathways into Darkness (back on a Mac IIci) so I'm very impressed. I think the game runs great on a stock V5200 at 1024x768 with medium settings.

Man that game is scary though. I've been getting in about an hour of play-time a week, would probably play a bit more if that little girl didn't freak me out so much. I'm too old for games anyway.

I just installed Homeworld (don't have HW2) for old times sake. What a great game. It plays pretty easily with the TrackPoint, too. The 3D is REALLY smooth (as one would expect -- it was smooth on video cards made 7 years ago!).

-darren

Hmm, I'm using Omega drivers and in the display settings driver claims that my X1300 has 512 MB of memory. That can't be right, right? Hypermemory (or what was the name of technique that would allow GPU to use also main RAM beside dedicated VRAM) wasn't supposed to be enabled in T60's.

FuguTabetai wrote:Man that game is scary though. I've been getting in about an hour of play-time a week, would probably play a bit more if that little girl didn't freak me out so much. I'm too old for games anyway.

I played the demo version a few days ago and that little girl IS freaky. I emptied out a clip or two when that girl popped out and freaked me out. I might purchase the full version, just have to wait for a price drop.

pekka wrote:Hmm, I'm using Omega drivers and in the display settings driver claims that my X1300 has 512 MB of memory. That can't be right, right? Hypermemory (or what was the name of technique that would allow GPU to use also main RAM beside dedicated VRAM) wasn't supposed to be enabled in T60's.

What are Omega drivers? I did a Google search, but I don't know what I am looking for. I understand that they are drivers for the ATI GPU, but where do I find them and what do they do?

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

The author picks .dlls from different releases of the ATI driver and combines them with modified default settings in an effort to optimize FPS. Sometimes there are trade-offs made to gain speed, but generally they produce a comparable image to the latest ATI drivers, often at a slightly improved FPS.

-darren

I haven't tried the Omega Drivers on my T60, but in the past one of the good point I liked about Omega Drivers was the fact that it doesn't use the ATI CCC (Catalyst Control Center). Personally, I prefer the old style control panel.....

Agreed. The new CCC doesn't seem to race the processor like the ond one did, but I still think it's a bit wasteful of space and memory.

FYI: On the T60p I think CCC is the only place that one can specify PowerPlay settings. On the T4x it was available through PowerManager but not on the T60. If someone knows of another way to access this (the clock switching aspect of PowerPlay that is) I'd love to know about it.

-darren

Well, for just about all the ATI chips I have seen in laptops nowadays, you can access PowerPlay directly from the Monitor Settings page, right click on the desktop, go to settings, go to advanced, and there should be a tab that say "ATI POWERplay".

You can also use NHC for it as well, although that requires adding more stuff.

christopher_wolf wrote:Well, for just about all the ATI chips I have seen in laptops nowadays, you can access PowerPlay directly from the Monitor Settings page, right click on the desktop, go to settings, go to advanced, and there should be a tab that say "ATI POWERplay".

I can't test this because I run CCC but my advanced properties have no card specific pages, just a page with a button to launch CCC. Is anyone running without CCC that could confirm whether there are additional pages?

-darren