GMA950 Screenshot thread!

Okay, so following on from my X200 and much bigger Go7400 screenshot threads, here is my final one, the GMA950 screenshot thread. We all know it's a poor card for gaming and should be avoided for such, but if you're really stuck, then here's an idea of what does and doesn't run, and how exactly it contrasts with Intel's official compatibility list. It won't be around much longer given the arrival of the newer wave of integrated graphics including Intel's own successor X3100, but it can and will be still found in many laptops for some time yet.

So, we start small! First up:

Quake III Arena
An older title now, and capable of running well on virtually anything, but at least it establishes a base for the cards performance.




Soldier of Fortune II
Like Quake III, it ran well, although image quality seemed very poor even with all options on.






Call of Duty
This one was interesting, as to a certain extent, it didn't hugely matter what settings the game were on - it tended to slow down in certain specific areas, particularly involving smoke, to the same extent whether on high or low settings. All in all ran well, and very playable, even online.






GTA III
Another older title, but at least if nothing else, we're proving that you can still play decent games on your GMA950 without having to go back too far.








Part 2: The newer Stuff - will the GMA950 play anything, and comparisons to Intel's compatibility list.


Doom 3
An older title by now but nonetheless still used in many benchmarks even today. Sadly the GMA950 falls flat on its face here, and the game is totally unplayable at the lowest settings for the most part. A regular occurrence with this card, the framerate remains mostly the same even when on higher settings.

Half Life 2
The king of hardware friendly shooters, but is the GMA even up to that challenge? According to Intel, no.

F.E.A.R
Very hardware intensive shooter, that you would be forgiven for automatically assuming attempting to play it on the GMA would result in dire consequences. IBut according to Intel, the game works fine. Is there hope in the GMA yet?

Guild Wars
Very hardware friendly game. Intel says it will run fine.

Far Cry
Like Doom 3, an older game but still beautiful and used for many benchmarks. Not included on Intel's list.

Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War
Popular FPS that while has forgiving requirements, can be very intensive on the system.

Generals observations - Image quality very poor in most games. Grainy appearance.

Generals conclusions - Stick with Dx8 games for a smooth gameplay experience, and try out Dx9 titles at our own risk. Regardless of a specific games requirements, or performance on technically similar hardware, Dx9 gaming on the GMA950 is a hit and miss and liable to cause alot of frustration.

 

probably struggles with smoke and such cuz it doesnt support T&L?

is HL2 really playable? those fps screens seem to say so....

or is that the intro only

 

SOFII is a classic. I have it installed on my laptop. Still looks quite generally rubbish alongside FEAR despite everything on max

 

This is an absolutely FANTASTIC thread. OH OH OH! My friend wants to use a GMA 950 while playing WOW, would you mind doing a basic test with that?

 

Havok, Intel updated their statement: http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel945g/sb/CS-020666.htm

Now if you click on the games, it sometimes gives a comment about the G965 even though its the 945G page. The color indicator no longer exists for the list. At one point, they must have unified the game compatibility list for the G965 and 945G.

Also, the reason frame rates remain similar despite different resolutions is because the geometry processing/hardware T&L/vertex shader performance is tied to the CPU.

What CPU was it used to achieve that performance??

 

HL2 was playable. Yes thats the intro but it's free roaming, the credits appear as you're playing the game. It was easily playable, even when I started throwing stuff around and attacking people. I would imagine, however, certain sections would be difficult - big open spaces for one. But all in all it seems playable for someone who had to make do.

I don't have WoW, sorry.

I think it was somewhere around the 1.8Ghz C2D mark, but I'd have to double check, with 1Gb of Ram.

edit: 1.83Ghz

 

I also have a GMA950 and I noticed (I played Doom, Fear, and GTA3 on my laptop as well) that a lot of games have this on screen pattern when played with the 950. Does anyone else notice this? I was wondering why that pattern is there and what it means.

 

I experienced it too while playing GTA but not frequently. At first i thought my notebook is overheat, but it occurs only when playing GTA. i have updated gma's driver and nothing happen. My notebook Inspiron 6000,1.6Ghz/1gb/gma900.

 

It might be an incompatibility with the RenderWare engine that GTA 3, VC, and SA all use. It'd be interesting to see numbers for Vice City, since although it adds T&L effects, the engine has been heavily optimized, and Vice City ran noticably smoother on my old GeForce2 MX than GTA 3. The big difference being from GTA 3 calculated everything while Vice City was smarter and had hidden object removal.

Anyways, it's great that you're doing this since it tells a lot more about the GMA950 than 3DMark. You might also want to try UT2004 seeing how common the Unreal 2 engine is, although modern games like recent Splinter Cell versions are doubtful.

 

Yeah....trust me I have tried to play new games on my Vaio. I have tried and tried and after many unsuccessful attempts, I chose to stop trying.

ALL the new Tom Clancy games won't work because the 950 doesn't have the proper shaders if any.

 

Have tried it before, it works but framerate is so inconsistant that it's not very playable.

 

Whats being used to show the fps?

 

FRAPS...the best for game capturing and showing frame rate...

http://www.fraps.com/download.php

EDIT:
be sure to enable the "Include Frame Rate Overlay On Screenshots" feature, so that frame rate will show up when you take screenshots.

the free un-registered version of FRAPS will only allow you to save image as ".BMP" format, and result in big image file size, usually above 1MB, thus, it's best that you then convert that image to .JPG format (compressed, small file size), by using Windows Paint, or any other image programs.

 

Oh ok thanks. I wanted to use it for half-life 2, i was going to post screen shots but then i saw you already had them.

 

This thread is great! Nice work. I have a GMA 950 myself. Good to see Quake 3 runs perfectly, as Im thinking of getting it for my laptop (giving that I can do online multiplayer on it with dial up).

Does GMA 950 support Star Wars Battlefront 1...or Quake 4?

 

I just saw on the compatibility list that Quake 4 won't run on GMA 950...what a shame. Still don't know whether Star Wars Battlefront 1 or 2 will work on it.

 

It's the lower Colour quality the pattern is called "Dithering", same with printing, if you zoom up on a collour inkjet printed page you should see the same patterm - switching to 16bit instead of 32bit will help performance but as you can see - visual quality takes a big hit

 

Battlefront is 'supposed' to work fine but I've no idea about BF2....I can't test it out now as I don't have the laptop on hand anymore (it wasn't mine)

 

Everyone is ripping on me that I am BS'ing a stuff... I seriously play Farcry and HL2 on my gma950 with good fps at decent settings... Thanks for clearing that up

Sooo anybody get Quake wars to work on their gma950 !?

 

i play WarRock P) at mid-high.... and bf1942 HIGH!! i'll try to get pics here

 

Just for our benefit, what might those settings be?

 

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Quake 4 will run. It'll just run slow, click on DETAILS

Do not rely on the colorful, pretty circle. Click on details to see what it says.

Performance will also depend greatly on your CPU. Don't expect it to run a fraction of what others run when you are running off a Celeron D 2.53GHz like I was.

 

The screenshots in this thread are at 800x600 for FC and 640x480 for HL2. You were claiming decent settings at 1280x800, which is entirely different.

 

Battlefield 2 WILL NOT WORK
WoW is playable (desktop) with occasional lag in 40-man instances (this is pre-BC WoW, i quit a year ago, so i dunno about now)
(at least on my desktop, check sig)

 

BATTLEFIELD 1942
Here you go. Resolution: 1200x789 Settings: all high
The thing is i get 7-17 FPS on high resolution i cant play online with it, so i have to lower it.
Overall: Great