Games on Intel 915GMS

I'm a very light gamer, so when I bought a new laptop a dedicated graphics card wasn't really a big concern for me. I bought a Sony Vaio S series VGN-S54B here in Japan (it's the latest model, so maybe it's an S5 in North America) and so far have been very impressed with it's gaming ability. It has an Intel 915GMS PCI Express with 128MB of shared RAM. I just wanted to put up a small list of games I've been able to run with it. I made some comments for the games that require special settings, and for those with no comments I have no problem running them.

1. Doom 3 - Playable at lowest settings and resolution
2. World of Warcraft - Very smooth at 1280x800 resolution.
3. Age of Empires III - Playable at medium settings.
4. Age of Mythology - The Titans
5. Medal of Honor Spearhead/Breakthrough
6. The Settlers 5
7. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
8. Max Payne 2
9. Thief: Deadly Shadows - Good on medium settings.
10. Mafia
11. Grand Theft Auto 3

In addition to the above games, I've also installed adventure games (my favorite genre) such as Syberia 2 and The Longest Journey and they of course play without any problem. It seems that any game that requires hardware T&L won't play, so unfortunately I wasn't able to get Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time working, but it plays most games very well.

I'm perfectly aware that this integrated graphics solution is not good for a heavy gamer, but for a light gamer like me who plays a few hours of WoW a week and maybe a little of another game, I'm really impressed with what this chip has been able to do. That I am able to play WoW and Age of Empires III on the go is really great. I'm curious as to what other games people have gotten working on this chip. I'm also wondering if anyone has gotten any games that require T&L working with 3D Analyze. I haven't tried it yet but have heard about it and wonder if it actually works.

Anyway, this chip isn't going to be good for Doom 3 LAN parties, but is perfectly fine for games like WoW, older 3D games and newer strategy games. To be able to play these on a system that is so small and light is pretty cool. Anybody else have any thoughts/experiences with this chip, good or bad?

 

I am very surprised to see that you can play all those games - must not look that great, but it is impressive nontheless. Let us know if you test out any new games!

Chaz

 

I was surprised that I could play those games too. Actually, most of them look pretty good. The older games, such as Medal of Honor and Age of Mythology look perfect. As for the newer games, it really depends on the game. Age of Empires III looks good at 1024x768 and the graphics are more than pretty enough for me. While it would look better if all of the options were on, it looks nice enough. Doom 3 looks horrible and I would never really play it on this machine. I just installed it to see if it would run. World of Warcraft looks great and honestly I only notice small differences in the quality when running it on this machine as compared to my gaming rig.

It really surprised me that I was able to run both AOEIII and WoW because if I go to srtest.com and test my machine for those games, it says that I won't be able to run either game because my graphics card does not have hardware T&L. Yet they both run fine. Call of Duty, however, will install but won't run.

On my old Toshiba with an integrated ATI 64MB card that also didn't have hardware T&L I wasn't able to run WoW at all. It's strange and I'm not really sure why I'm able to run these games, maybe it's a combination of all of the parts in my machine, and a little bit of luck? Whatever it is, I'm more than impressed with this chip for light gaming and WoW on the go.

 

AOE and WOW did kinda surprise me, I ran WoW fine on my 5~ year old desktop, intergrated graphics on an ASUS motherboard(Don't remember the model..) and on a AMD 1800+, that was cool

Although it sputtered for air often

 

Now that really really suprised me. If i want, i can not buy my ATI 9700 and go for the intel thing instead!

EDIT: Its because of my video memory that is lagging everything.. but of course the intel can't produce as rich the graphics as ATI.

 

My Dell i6000 (GMA900, 512MB DDR2) runs CoD very smooth at 1280x800 res., high setting on everything.

 

hmm ask a question, I am playing AOE3 and I set everything to the lowest, but when never I encounted at sea battles, the game lags... ya all know how to solve it ? please help

by the way I have a total for 1.5gig of Ram

also I try updating it to the lastest driver for the intel GMA 900 but after updating ... the graphic card show me "Can't find requested String" and i cannot edit my graphic setting.

 

Does Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic really play on your system or does it just kind of come up and you can barely move? I have an ATI Radeon xpress 200M and that is the only game I have played that I have not been able to play even on the lowest settings. Technically it will "play" but it is by no means very fast. I have not tested it but probably 1 fram per second or some such. All the other games have played such as NeverWinter Nights, Star Wars: Jedi Academy, Madden NFL 2004, all play quite well.

 

Everyone makes the card sound like crap. And say it can't run very many games. It can run HL2!! On low settings... And I believe Intel has a list of the games that it can run on their site. One game that it cant play is BF2.

 

Hahaa, I would not say it is like **** but just that I am having some problems with it. I'm not a real PC gamer just that I wanna complete the AOE3 and remove it asap but somehow when there is a ship battle it lags alot which I dunno what is the reason.

If really to say notebook graphic card would be like **** .. Haha because it is a super scale down of standard graphic card for desktop. looking at the desktop graphic card prices as well.