How mediocre is the 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS?

I've seen threads here where people are over clocking and tweaking the 8400GS to get every last bit of performance. Others have opted for the 8600GT. I assume folks in both camps are heavy duty gamers.

How about for someone who uses Photoshop, watch an ocassional DVD and youtube videos, and maybe venture into a game at holiday time; how will the performance of the stock 8400GS be for these kind of users? I have an older game called Medal of Honor Allied Assault, would the 8400GS be capable of handling a game of this genre?

simonz

 

The 8400m GS will handle most current games at low-mid settings. You can find out more about it here.

 

It will do everything perfectly except play high end games at high settins. It will rock MOHAA tho like all full settings and highest rez. New games will just have to be played at lower settings

 

I think it MAY possibly MAY play bioshock at the lowest settings.

 

Actually, at 1024x640 (the notebook widescreen equivalent of 1024x768), it can hit Medium on some of the settings (with AA/AF turned off, of course). It still might stutter here and there, but it'll definitely be playable, and more importantly, enjoyable. If you want to hit Medium for most of the settings, simply turn the resolution down another notch.

The 8600M GT, on the other hand, can perform with rock solid FPS even with all settings at Medium and a few less performance hogging settings at High (again, at 1024x640 resolution).

This is what I'm hearing from some sources as well as a friend with an Inspiron 1520 and a 8600M GT.

But, like chesieofdarock said above, it will rock MOHAA like the second coming of Christ (That game is at least 4 years old if memory serves...).

 

Uh, no, I'm playing it just fine at medium settings 800x600 in dx10. In dx9 I can up the res

 

8400M GS can easily handle medal of honor allied assault at the highest possible settings.

 

Well, as far as games go, I have a Vostro 1400 with a 8400GS, and while its no where near high-end its far from useless. I was playing Half-Life 2 episode 1 for a while on it, with high-settings (no AA/AF) at 1280x800 and got a fairly consistent ~60 FPS (and while HL2 is 3 years old, episode 1 is a good deal more demanding). I've played Command and Conquer 3, and while the card struggles with the "medium" quality preset, on the low preset it runs very smoothly at 1280x800. Likewise, Star Wars Empire at War also ran very smoothly at 1280x800. And while the BioShock demo didn't run very well at 1280x800, lowering the resolution at bit I could get it running at a very playable setting.

 

Yeah, the 8400M GS isn't as shoddy as people are making them out to be, especially at lower resolutions (1024x640 or 800x500--these two resolutions are wide screen resolution [16:10], so there won't be any FOV warping. Use these two resolutions instead of 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 when supported) it performs very well.

With the 8600M GT, it basically performs just like the 8400M GS, but at one higher resolution level (So, if you're used to running Bioshock at Medium on 800 x 500, you can bump it up to 1024 x 640. Likewise, if a game runs well at 1024 x 640 on a 8400M GS, you can bump it up to native 1280 x 800 res with a 8600M GT). This is just a general stereotyping, and is not totally accurate for all games.

 

I've noticed too that for some reason the biggest performance hit for the 8400GS is resolution. If you turn it down you get a nice boost. Depending on the other specs of the system, lots of games should be playable.

I opted for the T7100 CPU (for the virtualization support) and 1GB of RAM, and I find the Bioshock demo playable on high settings, although it slows down with lots of enemies on screen and would probably be faster to turn things down then (also the nvidia recommended bioshock drivers from laptopvideo2go.com). Also, interestingly, it runs much faster for me under dx10 than dx9 mode.

Stalker is also playable even with pretty high detail (most sliders on medium, but you can turn sun shadow on!) if you get the float32 mod, although it reads the disk a lot so I think I need more RAM.

Also I just installed Supreme Commander, and it seems decently playable at least for the first mission with shadows off. Things may get worse later I have 2GB of RAM coming in the mail which should help

Still, if the machine is primarily for gaming, you're going to want the 8600GT. The 8400M GS can store half as many textures, and doesn't have as many shader units.

Edit: Forgot to mention this is running Vista Basic 32-bit. I'm not sure how 64-bit or XP would affect performance.

 

Yeah, the 8400M GS is only 128MB with 16 unified pipelines while the 8600M GT doubles it in both sectors.

 

A highly overclocked 8400GS is only about 10%-20% slower than the 8600GT. It does quite well in most games. Medium settings for most games I have tried. FEAR, CSS, HL2, DODS...

 

Im assuming warcraft 3 would run just fine with it?

 

Hey, anybody tried playing fifa 2007 with the 8400GS? been doing it on my Vostro 1400, but it lags always.

 

For some reason I'm capped @ 60 fps playing CS 1.6 ?? Anyone know how to fix this? I've already set fps_max to 101 and stuff.

 

Vsync is on? Can it be from the 60Hz?

 

Yeah I'm running it on max settings. I don't know if it's just me being stupid but it's not letting me run at 1280x800, as in there's no option to. It only lets me go to 1024x768

 

Easily. As a matter of fact, it ran perfectly fine on my old Presario that had integrated ATI graphics (Radeon Xpress 200m).

 

Ok for for new games like Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock will the 8400 GS be able to run it decently when it is overclocked?

 

Warcraft 3 does not have native wide screen support, unfortunately.

There is a registry hack you can apply to make the native rendering 1280x800, but the FOV will still be skewed (a.k.a. stretched).

Yes... a bit below Medium settings at probably 1024x640 or 800x500 (at 1024x640, the FPS may still stutter here and there, at 800x500, it should be pretty rock solid). However, an overclocked 8600M GT would definitely out perform that, again.

So, if you're doing apples to apples comparison (i.e.: OC'd 8400M GS s. OC'd 8600M GT), the 8600M GT is obviously going to win no matter what. But if you can't afford the extra 50-100 dollar upgrade (depending on the model of laptop you chose), than OC'ing the 8400M GS is your best bet.