FURTHER PROOF that FEAR can be played WELL on X200!!

I thank you all for your interest and replies but let me assure you that I am not lying. And I am certainly not trying to make the X200 out to be a great gaming card or anything close to great. I bought my Laptop on a budget and the only laptop I could afford for €600 with any graphics card was my Toshiba Satellite Pro A100. I had heard that the X200 could handle older games like Operation Flashpoint and Alien vs Predator2 and that was more than good enough for me!. Yet over time I had hear rumours that the card was more capable than people made it out to be, and certainly not the piece of crap that a lot of the people on this site “assume” it is. So after seeing that it played my older games at ease I decided to test it to its limits on an extremely demanding game like FEAR and was VERY surprised!!. And it is after witnessing the good performance of the card itself, I wanted to get the word out (with proof!) that the card is indeed quite capable! Not anything compared to a dedicated GPU but still good!!! In fact I still very surprised how a intetrated gpu with NONE of its own memory can perform so well on most games! Fair play ATI!

Also im getting a lot of people just telling me how with their high end video cards, they can play Fear at max settings. What good is that info to me? U are jst trying to show how u have a better card than me and of course an x1600 and x1400 and so on will play the game much better!
But the point of me making this post was to show everyone who may be interested (and obviously a lot of people are) that the x200 is more capable than people would expect.. And instead of me jst saying that…and people calling me a liar.. I chose to show proof..

And EMOTION.. I know that anything around 40fps+ is as good as you “really” need but anything around 30fps is by far smooth enough to enjoy gameplay 90% as much as someone playing at 40fps.
What you see in the photos perfectly represents what I saw on full screen, I promise you. And I decreased the size of the photos to allow them to be posted on this site but the quality looks no better and if not maybe a little worse as I think some pic quality was lost on downsizing and decreasing the size of the photos.

As Pulp said yes you do notice a difference when the frame rate falls towards the 25fps mark but smooth gameplay isn’t affected until it drops to 20fps or below.

And here are jst some further notes on my game settings:
When I forced Dx8 the game played terribly.
The shadows are on, and lighting+special effects are at medium as well as other settings such as world detail and Game Physics.
My Laptop is a 1.4Ghz Celeron M with the version of the X200 that has NO dediacted memory but the RAM is very fast and is DDR2 533Mhz PC4200. Also my HD runs at 5400rpm. The shared version of the x200 obviously is heavily dependant on the type/speed of RAM you have and so that is the reason why mine performed so well, whereas people with slower AMD based notebooks that only support DDR RAM arent exactly suited to any sort of real gaming. I have heard reports that these people have difficulty playing older Open GL games..however i can report that i have no such difficulty and that people who have reported that the x200 is unsuited to play Open GL games are VERY mistaken.

Oh and finally.. I had already mentioned this in my first thread that the video you will see doesnt accurately represent how well the game performs on my laptop as when i was using FRAPS to record the video during gameplay, the average Fps fell quite a bit. (it fell by 6-10fps) So even though recording looks smooth, i enjoy even smoother gameplay.

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO AT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_m4-_fy8Ss

 

Wow, that is awesome. That x200 outperformed my 6200 on my desktop computer with a P4 2.66 and 1 gig of ram.

 

Good job. Congratulations

 

Such an amazing integrated card!! I would never expect a x200 would perform that well.
Here comes a little request, would u mind benchmark the x200 of your laptop?
Just wanna make some comparision with dedicated cards, thank you!

 

thank you

thank you

thank you

it sure does get old hearing all these abstract benchmarking #s / pissing contests when the proof is in the pudding; i.e., actual gameplay.

thanks for the effort of capping and posting

 

While I am extremely displeased with the X200 chipset overall, I will admit that it doesn't get nearly enough credit for it's gaming power. Obviously it's not as good as a dedicated card. But the X200 definitely sheds the "intergrated graphics suck" reputation.

And I wouldn't call AMD laptops "slower", espicially when you're comparing your own system with a Celeron M 1.4GHz. All the Semprons and Turions on the market are definitely faster than the Celeron.

I have an AMD based system with an X200 that has 128MB of dedicated memory. I have absolutely no problem running older OpenGL games. Modern games run fine as well. I can get around 30fps in Half-Life 2 with the highest settings at 1280x800x32. Not bad for a videocard with only 2 pixel pipelines and a fillrate of about 700Mpixels/sec

 

Hey you misunserstood what i said about AMD notebooks. Notebooks with the Turion/Sempron processors dont support DDR2 RAM (533Mhz) and so if they only have the shared version of the X200 (and so it is relying on slower DDR (333Mhz PC2700 RAM) gaming will suffer. Your case is the opposite however as you have the dedicated version of the X200 which obviously wont rely on the speed of the RAM as a laptop would with the shared version.

Something like a 1.8Ghz Turion powered notebook will obviously be more powerful than mine overall but will be less so in gaming if it has the shared X200 running on its slower DDR memory (which the X200 totally relies on..) wheras my laptop has the benefit of faster RAM, even though i have a slower CPU.. This jst shows further how the integrated gpu's rely so much on RAM speed than anything else..

 

Oh and i only got a 3D Mark score of 622.. and installing Omega Drivers made NO difference in gaming performance. And even though you would expect forcing the game to play in less demanding DirectX 8 would increase performance... it actually had the opposite affect! I had to leave it on DX9 Shaders

 

That's really great man! I would have never thought that was even possible!!

 

Hi All,
i have to agree with BeachandMusic, the dedicated version of the X200 is a decent gpu. It won't set the world on fire but it does play most older games with no problems. I have run Doom 3 with the Resurrection Evil pack at medium and high settings without any problems. At high settings it can get a little choppy when there is a lot of movement and critters running around. At medium it really doesnt care what's going on. 3DMark03 scores on my DV5030 are 1530

 

performance test
min 24 fps
avg 26 fps
max 38 fps
800*600 (everthing low or off)
pm 1.73
1gb ram ddr 2 533
80 gb hdd 5400
x200 m (128 share only)

 

If the x200 can play F.E.A.R. my X1600 256mb should do it with ease.

Ill post my results once I get F.E.A.R. Combat downloaded.

 

I didn't wonder at all. The game fear is more a processor using game than a gpu game. Only if u use gpu medium or high gpu settings the game need a faster gpu.
Search for some test of FEAR you'll see the fps depends a lot of the cpu you use.

 

Hmmm.. im not getting as much people telling me im a liar when the proof is in your faces. ha

 

Looks pretty good, surprisingly so. Glad you're happy

 

Ok im getting 30+ fps with most high some medium settings, looks great!

 

I never doubted you a bit!! Immediately after I read your other thread I downloaded the free multiplayer combat version (will load fear singleplayer as soon as i locate the box

I don't have framerates but i had 800x600 most medium settings and it slowed down a little on some parts but for the most part it was SMOOTH sailing.

I originally kicked myself, I almost bought a nice acer with 128meg x1600 but money came up short and I bought this system for $900 from my dad. I figured oh well....maybe some quake 3 or something will run well.

So far i've played World of Warcraft, Halflife 2, Unreal 2004, Fear all well within acceptable play for me.

So hats off to you for showing me the way!!

 

It's because the game isnt heavy to play when you put almost everything to low or even off. In such circumstances it will be the cpu which will be the bottleneck not the gpu. You can also try to use pixel doubling, the game will play smoother at cost of graphics.

 

hmmm, i seem to get a crapload of lag in FEAR in heavy firefights, yet the grahpics dont seem that great for them to be overkilling my X1600...

 

the graphics are very good i think, especially when you fire. But i hate the walls with the sharp corners.

 

Thanks for the input lads.. I appreciate the comments.. Although i cant see the game as being purely limited by the cpu as some of you have said.. as i only have a 1.4Ghz Celeron M and im playing at medium settings!

 

Thanks for all the effort Fishy. You do the x200 and Celeron proud! Gives the rest of us with low end graphics some glimmer of hope!

 

Well as much as I enjoyed the cheap laptop iv been living with this past while.. im finally going to be upgrading to something much better. A Toshiba Satellite Pro P100 with the 256mb dedicated 7600!! Cant wait to be able to see how FEAR looks with everything maxed out!

 

It looks incredible. I just played with it a bit there on my main desktop at 1024x768 with everything maxed out - its so beautiful you'll find yourself shooting at walls and barrells on purpose and throwing grenades just to see the shock waves....ignoring the actual gameplay....