GMA X3100 - Gaming

First, I would like to thank all the users that have been posting relevant information regarding the playability of PC games with the Intel gma x3100 int. vid card. I wish to continue this with a new thread as long as the moderators approve of it and in return the thread providing quality results and consistency on gaming with the gma x3100 card.

We all know that the Gma x3100 isn't a gaming vid card, however I believe the majority of PC laptops consumers use int. graphic cards either from Intel or Amd (with Intel leading) The last thread provided information that was helpful with the fact that PC games do work with or without some modifications albeit its not going to run Assasin's Creed
But Starcraft 2, I highly believe it will

Yes, ima noob but i've been reading the last thread for a few weeks and I feel that it really helped out the internet community who uses its results and knowledge. (I just google'd gma x3100 and look where it landed me
This goes esp. for me since i just got myself a new Ideapad y510 with gma x3100

Unreal, I will be playing with the config file for COD4 so thank you ahead of time. I will try to post some results on other games that follows the trail of the thread when I get a chance. Games Im installing, HL2, CS source, AOE3, and THIEF3: DS.

Keep this thread alive Or re-admit the old one!!

 

Unfortunately the original X3100 gaming thread has been closed due to abuse.

I hope this one fares better. Will posters bear in mind that the X3100 is not designed to be a gaming GPU so any gaming performance is a bonus.

John

 

While I agreed that the original X3100 gaming thread ended disastrously due to abuse by users with lack of support for their post.

I hardly would believe that the X3100 card is overall a failure itself. It has a lot of potential that have yet to be full fill due to poor drivers. But the card does have the potential to be a consumers alternative choice for a graphic card that they can depend on for casual gaming without spending more money on medium/higher-end graphic cards.

 

The X3100 isn't bad on paper. Its just that it turned out poorly due to bad drivers. It seems Intel can't tap into its hidden potential.

That being said, I personally think a low end GPU would be a much better choice for people who even think about playing a game once in awhile. A 8400M GS or HD 2300/2400 will crush any IGP.

I think for now IGP's are best of in notebooks that will be used for portability and batterylife.

 

Battery life and light gaming= X3100

Less battery life, more heat, intensive gaming= dedicated card.

I have the X3100 and it does a very good job at older games (2-3 years old). good detail, frame rates,etc. It's a good alternative if your more concerned about battery life.

However, when I play newer games I use my desktop or Xbox.

However, the X3100 works good when i need to kill some time while traveling.

 

So the major problem of Gma x3100 is the drivers.

Which are the best drivers? the fastest ones?

 

I should hope so. It's the same with GPU's. It depends.

 

you didn't answer my question

which are the best drivers?

 

Intel is the only company that writes drives for them...otherwise we'd all be talking about more powerful drivers.

 

Hi

Well Mike Abel from Intel has a couple videos up - found them on Youtube and he said it best...

"Intel's Integrated Graphics are now able to play games that were previously unable to run. At a 'playable' frame rate, but for serious gaming WE still recommend a discrete card"

that said, games that are a few years old run good, games that are newer than that are dicey if they run at all, games that are older than that inexplicably run worse than some 2004-2006 games.

eg (personal experience)

Pretty Good:
NFS: Carbon (low-mid), Most Wanted, Underground*(mid-high) Pro street at very low settings
Unreal Tournament 2004 - best graphics and speed I have found on this card (high settings indoor - mid outdoor)

Half Life2 (high settings with some irritating slowdowns)
C&C3 (low settings - stable)
Battlefield 2 & 2142 (low settings - stable)
S plinter Cell orig- pandora- double agent- (mid-high stable) chaos theory runs slower, but due to the nature of gameplay is acceptable. (low settings)
FEAR, definitely takes a hit in the look of the game though (very low)
Far Cry, plays fine looks alright (low-mid)

Poorly:
CS:S Haven't tried it, but with unstable framerate, you will be frustrated
COD4 I put this here cause it looks worse than COD2 and is less fun IMO
at the level that it will run (very low)

Midnight Club 2 : I had the same probs as the poster unreal596 reported so I deleted it

Quake 4 this was unplayable to me, other people report it working but Doom 3 should work better and is a better game IMO.

Unreal Tournament 3 : Could not make this playable.

Not at all:
Crysis - was a total slideshow, on the lowest settings. No surprise really

that is all I can think of right now, all games that I have tested on Vista with a Compaq c751nr
dual core 1.6ghz
1gb ram
x3100 128 allocated
Vista Lite

No special Configuration to anything.

Overall this was a great value laptop and the x3100 allows you to play a variety of games with stable framerates on a budget notebook which is a lucky break after all.

I would have gone with a dedicated solution if I had known, at least with the games I want to play!

 

Pretty Good:
Stalker (mid-high) indoor fast, outdoor normal.

Poorly:
Black and white 2 (very low) - slow.

my system:
2 gb ram
Dual core 1.60 ghz
windows xp x64

 

I have the same chipset in my HP DV 2000. I can play FEAR Gold on medium and FSX with most of the settings near high. I found when I bought Supreme Commander that I didnt have a good enough graphics card. I plan on purchasing a new PC and I'm shopping around for a good one. This site has been helpful.

 

Ran Halflife 2 vid test - on 1280 768 rez.
Direct X 9 - 15fps
Direct X 7 - 24fps

Ran CS-Source vid test - on 1024 768 rez.
Direct X 9 - 12fps
Direct X 7 - 22fps - sort of playable.

* Direct 7 mode is best played *


COD4 with unreal's config file seems to give 2 - 3 fps but guestimate since i did not use fraps. Will follow up on this..


BTW this on Vista Premium.

 

What kind of abuse?

 

NOTE - All games set on the lowest of the low settings

 

On one side people insisting that the x3100 is umm.... livable, not that bad, sorta good for certain games. etc

On the other side people insisting the x3100 is an absolute piece of garbage and to avoid it at all costs. And that it can't run anything but quake 3. (actual quote) when it runs LOTS of games.

It won't win any awards, but it's the best some of us have. There is a big price difference between laptops with x3100's or dedicated cards. And there's a huge installed base of x3100's so we hope drivers would improve, soon...

 

Pretty much with wolfgangvh said on page 1......

Heres my new Call Of Duty 4 Config, i made a few more changes & also take note im running XP "NOT" Vista. So i have no clue what the performance is goin to be in Vista, I recommend XP for theses Configs as someone said they was gettin 2-3 FPS on Vista. I manage to get around 20-40 FPS, Mainly 25-28. Also take note that ive done alot of tweaks to XP from Services & registry so u may not get the FPS that i am gettin but you should be close.

New Configs:

 

i just got the X3100 an it cant run ****, my GMA 945 bench and run games almost twice as fast. My GMA 945 also has a low CPU lol!!

 

I will have my hands on a new X3100 laptop (T5450, 3GB ram, Vista) in the next few weeks and was wondering if any of you have hands on experience with playing older games on it. By older I mean games like Morrowind, Starcraft, Diablo 2, etc... I have no expectation of great performance on any newer games but was hoping these older games would run well. Thanks - once I get my laptop up and running I will share my experience with some of these older games.

Hopefully Intel upgrades the drivers soon...

 

Just curious... is this a DX10 card ?

 

Intel claims it will be with a driver that was supposed to be release this year. Though I highly doubt that will help much playing any Dx10 games in the future.

 

Okay. Just thought I should know where Intel's best GPU stands.

 

Intels best GPU isn't going to kick ass anytime soon.

I have a GMA950 in my XPS M1210 and its decent. Renders the desktop and can play some oldies when I have to wait. I don't expect any miracles from it.

 

Ok what are your total specs.

Are you running default Vista, with a bunch of bloatware.

I have a jam packed hard drive with 2002-2007 games running fine.

First update to latest drivers, because your os may have shipped with older ones.

Another point I want to make is that software today, not just high-graphics games, but everything is taking 4x the computing power to do not much more than it used to. take the difference between Nero Burning rom 7 and 8, how bloated is that.

Part of this is not really Intel's fault because developers are bloating the crap out of every simple program, and yet the functionality is still at late 90's level.

Someone back me up on that at least!

 

thanks for answer but i am running Win Xp with the latest driver for my x3100. My full spec is 1, GHz Celeron and 512 MB ram DDR2. I know it can be the ram but my other lapop has only 512 more and a celeron 1,6 Hz and runig games a lot better.

 

Intel has mostly focused on X3100 drivers for Vista. Don't be surprised if XP does not perform as well.

 

I second moderator Greg's comment.

How much shared memory is allocated.

As I told you in PM my 1gb system only allocated 86mb shared in XP and most things barely ran. In Vista it allocates 128mb and things run alright. I would not be surprised if yours allocated 56-64mb w/512 system ram.

The amount of shared memory will not massively improve overall frame rates, but will cause massive momentary slowdowns when things swap in and out of ram, this causes huge instability in performance when groups of models and geometery appear on screen. (very noticable in Source games, for instance)

Check your shared memory in the Intel driver screen (should be avail in task bar icon)

If you can't return your laptop, you might consider a ram upgrade, they are not that expensive and would make a difference in your situation, IMO. I know that may not sound nice, but games are at best an afterthought for laptops in this class. So I consider it a blessing to run any at all.

I will sell you my 1gb when I upgrade to 2gb for cheap, but that won't be for a while. (I don't know if that's appropriate to say here..)

 

i know the old x3100 thread was closed, but i just wanted to say that the latest Dec 2007 drivers for XP fixed the problems in Blade of Darkness, it now plays great no texture issues... if anyone cared

edit: the z-buffer was fixed but the textures on the characters sometimes disappear and reappear...sooo yea not completely fixed but very playable

 

Sins of a Solar Empire : working real nice here (high settings)

Real good game, and I thought they only made windowblinds

 

The Club On The X3100 (Wow!!!)

What can i say? really just like......WOW!!!! very shocked that this game even started up, Seeing how its ported right from the Xbox 360 but it actually ran decent (Atleast to me) Avg 15-20, Mainly 16 or 17 FPS, Framerate around 10 to 15 outside & 20+ Inside but to me its deff. playable. Theres no config settings at all so this is probably the best its gunna get until Intel releases some better drivers, But i must say im surprised at this game really.......

Settings:

Screens:

 

Well I'm not that surprise if The Club is playable on the X3100, the graphic looks too out dated first.

 

got 2moons to runs well on my x3100 never drops under 15 FPS will all details on highest and 1280 x 800 resolution

 

well thats because i had everything on low, but yeah even on the 360 they dont look all that great but its still surprising that a new game runs on the X3100 though.

 

I play Diablo 2, but it seems like theres a compatability issue with Vista. I have vista Business and my framerate in D2 drops very low in busy areas and if theres a lot of people on the screen.

I have t5250 , 2 gig of ram , and vista business. Running in compatability mode with XP and other windows versions didn't help...

 

i run D2 with good FPS on my celeron 333 and windoes 98 with 128 MB ram and a vodoo 2

 

yes but u don't run it under Vista

 

It doesnt matter he does not have a X3100 so who cares really, this is a X3100 thread not a Voodoo 2 thread.

 

well with diablo 2 the x3100 is not really a bottleneck, its just the game is so old theres probably compatability issues with newest OS and Drivers

i wish i would be able to figure out how to run Diablo 2 properly..

 

i think X3100 run all games poorly because both the newer and older games gets low fps even WC3 and Diablo 2 lol i havent seen any games which it ran with good FPS yet expec from Revolt in XP

 

Wow i guess u haven't read threw the old X3100 Thread? There are tons of games that run on the X3100 from new to Old, and i posted alot of screens in that thread with very playable FPS so u may wanna check that out before you start saying stuff thats Deff. not true.......

 

Could u play CC generals with the x3100 celeron 1,8 and 1 GB ddr 2?

 

Mmhmm, should be no problem. But adjust some graphic qualities just to play it safe.

 

I am starting up a dedicated server, its still in testing & its not goin to be up 24/7 but it will most of the time, And its goin to be modded to where theres no Fog meaning more FPS for you X3100 users. This is also to let u guys see what a difference it does make when fog is turned off, And later down the road ill also turn off Snow & rain too, but for now just fog. Im looking for testers as well, So hit me up on xfire for more info & the server address when i get it officially running.

Xfire: Unreal596

 

Which game is this for, unreal?

 

I tried to load vista ultimate on a 1501, and it was a no go! I think it was because of the x3100, since it kept stopping at "driver not found, restart computer to start vista installation over".

 

Oh hahah my bad, its for cod 4

 

Sounds great, count me in. My xfire handle is Deify88.

 

ok .

 

Haha, this is gonna be a repeat of the closed thread . Only a matter of time(in fact, a short one) before it becomes as big as the other one.

 

Oblivion is somewhat playable using the Oldblivion mod and when I tweaked the settings using the geforce go 7400 tweaks found in the 7400 screenshot thread I also enabled rhe game to run pixel shader 3.0 which greatly improved the graphics so much that atleast to me it looks like its running on low-med settings on the regular oblivion without the oldblivion mod the only problem is when you get out of the prison into the open feilds when the framerate drops to 5-12 fps does anyone know how to get better speed on the open feilds? (even dropping down the resolution to 800x600 only improves by 3fps.)

Specs:Gateway MT6920
3GB of DDR2 ram
T5550 @ 1.83ghz (Core2Duo)
intel X3100













(Used Fraps for screenshots but for some reason Fps did not show on screeshots?)