What Games Can I Run With Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100?

Purolator left me a message saying my Dell laptop will arrive tomorrow morning. Ordered the Inspiron 13 on Sep 10th. Would I be able to run Counter Strike Source on high with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100? I was able to run Fallout 3 on medium with GeForce 9500M GS. How does Intel X3100 compare to NVIDIA GeForce 9500M GS?

Note: I don't play any computer games. Had Fallout 3 for PC when my Xbox 360 broke again. I'm not going to play any games with this new Inspiron 13, but still just wondering. I have a 16" Acer right now, I wanted a smaller laptop to carry around and faster CPU. I hope the T8300 does its job.

 

Pretty much everything will be unplayable with the X3100. The GeForce spanks the hell out of it.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4154

You'd be lucky to run even CounterStrike Source at lowest graphical settings and 640x480 resolution.

 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-X3100.2176.0.html

The tests say it can play Half Life at 800x600 at LOW settings. So I am guessing even Counter Strike will run and you'll be able to play at those settings. But you won't have fun though. It won't look pretty + any opponent over few metres away won't be clearly spottable and will shoot the living crap out of you :|

Forget FallOut 3 and pretty much every game which came after 2002. Sorry! But still congrats on the new lappy.

 

AND OMG! DONT EVEN COMPARE IT WITH 9500M! THEY ARE CLASSES APART! LITERALLY!

LOOK AT THE CLASS CHART ON THE ABOVE LINK WHICH I GAVE YOU. ITS ON THE RIGHT HAND SIDE OF THE WEBSITE. THESE ARE KIND OF RANKINGS OF THE VIDEO CARDS ON LAPTOPS. BUT NOT 100% CORRECT IN TERMS OF EVERY GAME.

For example, Nvidia 9500M is over ATI 4570 in the list, but its easily possible that ATI 4570 on some laptops will play tonnes of games better than 9500M. But the distance between your Intel and the 9500M is FAAAAAAR too huge. No comparison

 

btw I JUST read this: You're getting T F'IN 8300 Processor and that crappy video card?! WHY THE F WOULD YOU DO THAT?! There will be a clear case of bottlenecking! Hell, even if you had 9500M on your laptop, the video card still would be the bottleneck! Considering you won't be gaming or on this small laptop, even T4200 would've been great and you would have saved some MAJOR bucks. I don't think you'll be even OCCASIONALLY using the processor to its max capability.

 

How can you say that when you've no idea what they'll be using the machine for? Sorry but in my honest opinion views like this are just a little blinkered.

Yes the GPU you've selected can play Half Life, not sure about CS & HL2, can't remember if I played them, you can even get some games to run on it that are specced to require more, like the original Far Cry I believe I had running on my old X3100 and Hitman 2 Silent Assasin for that matter.

It wont run Crysis of course, but doesn't sound like you really do a lot of gaming on it.

 

The X3100 should handle Counter-Strike: Source reasonably well. You may have to compromise some settings for the sake of framerate, but CS:S is not a very demanding game at all. Also, please ignore jawedib's posts; he's being rather uncharacteristically insulting and pretentious in this thread. If you need processing power and not a 100% gaming machine, there is absolutely nothing wrong with pairing the X3100 with the T8300. I actually have a Latitude E6400 that I use for class and programming stuff that has the 4500MHD with a T9500.

 

wow.. I guess I've been misunderstood! Maybe I was looking at it through my point of view too much. My point was: he could have saved money on the processor and gotten a better video card.

I see a lot of people thinking "oh I need the best processor so I can play Far Cry etc." and we all know how PC slows down after a couple of years and people start blaming the processor when its really more of a registry issue. And this guy wasn't sure about the Intel X3100 card. So I just assumed he made that mistake.. Anyways, I guess only he can tell us that

Btw guardianflash, let us know what CPU intensive work you were intending to do?

 

I disagree I think it's a waste of money to buy such a nice CPU and pair it with integrated graphics. Even if you don't run games you still would benefit from having better desktop performance, overall video quality, media performance like video/HD, and more and more applications are using more advanced rendering techniques than ever before. There's a slew of new applications that can even offload some computations to the GPU and in that case you never know when it will come in handy. I was much happier when I was able to exchange my E1705 that I originally got with a 945GM integrated graphics upto a Radeon X1400, and then when I went from that to GeForce Go 7900 GS I was even happier. The desktop experience is better with quality video, even 2D rendering is better.

The GeForce 9500M is almost faster than my GeForce Go 7900 GS and the 7900 handles mostly everything with high settings and high resolutions. Hardly any problems at all. Plus it has DirectX 10.

 

@ gaah.. thank you!

 

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, that's fine - my point was that not accepting that other people are also entitled to their own opinion is somewhat blinkered.

 

I only play a couple games on my Laptop Command and Conquer Generals, Warcraft 3, C&C3. And they always ran ok. I Had to run them in XP SP2 Compatability Mode in Vista 64-bit.

But for some reason after I installed Vista SP2, ,and enabled Virtualization in the BIOS for the Core 2 Duo.

they now run buttery smooth at Max settings.


But I am still using the darn ATI driver from when my 1737 shipped 64-bit driver. I would love some newer updated drivers. The only ones on DELL's site for 64-Bit work but they disable or eliminate PowerPlay, it not there any more, then I just go back to the old shipped drivers.

I would imagine I could squeeze a little more cycles and shaders and performance out of this card. I tried,

Half Life 2, Episode 2 on Max settings with Vsync and 1920x1200 res, and its runs at 40_ frames which shocked me and 8xAA

But as soon as any enemies show up, it goes down to 15 frames.

The fact that the game even loaded was enough to make me happy at those setting.


Same with Crysis, MAX settings Max res, at least its loads and it plays, But at 3 frames per second.

I don't game much I just tried to for experimentation, and it was a Crysis DEMO, I would imagine Crysis with all the Patches, and 64-bit support, would run just a little better.

 

Here is a blog for you:
http://x3100gaming.blogspot.com/

Now here is a list of games:
http://x3100gaming.blogspot.com/2008/12/games-playable.html

I have played HL2 on max settings (no AA though) and it was good.
I have a T7300 cpu, and at the time I had only 1gb ram.

This graphics card likes dual channel ram, and update your graphics driver ASAP. It will make a big difference.

Download the latest one from intel. If it says it's incompatible with your notebook then uninstall the current driver and try again.
If that fails then install it manually.

It's not a good card though.
I would consider this:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=418851