Geforce 8400m GS performance with S.T.A.L.K.E.R and SWAT 4 (screens)

Hey guys,
This is a follow-up of sorts to my GMA 900 running S.T.A.L.K.E.R. thread. My new Vostro 1400 arrived yesterday, so I thought I'd give it a quick run through its paces before I got to work.

These are on stock drivers, running Vista Ultimate, on a System with a 1.66ghz t5470 processor with 2gb of RAM. The graphics card is a Geforce 8400m GS with 128mb of RAM. I used FRAPS to display the framerate and take the screenshots.

Disclaimer: I like fast framerates and heaps of detail over high resolution, so I do most of my gaming in 800x600. It taxes the card less.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: This is on highest detail settings, antiailiasing on, static lighting, and with the viewing field tweaked in advanced settings to be a bit further out:

Exploring the countryside (About to get the jump on a guard)



Indoors (framerates faster here)



Trying to get as much foliage in view as possible





SWAT 4: This game runs on the Unreal engine. I chose it due to it's highly detailed environments as well as it's active AI (four squadmates, plus civilians, plus criminals) to try and tax my system. I also chose it because it was cheap and fun. Performance was good all around (even during heavy firefights)

The bank level (slow frames due to heavy shootout)



Outside the 7-11 hostage level



I meant to take better screenshots when playing SWAT, but I kept on getting so damn involved!. I will also try to do some other games, but have only had the laptop for 24 hours so far.

 

Wow, STALKER looks great. Especially considering it is at 800 x 600! Thanks for the shots!

 

how does Halo 1 , Halo 2 or counterstrike play on it?

 

This thread deserves more attention.

thanks a bunch chancho for your screenshots, they really do look pretty amazing for a *400 nvidia card. lol, games kinda do that to you sometimes, in terms of getting involved in them.

Thanks for the pm, nice to know good people are still out there.

 

I don't have Halo 2 or CS yet (Will download CS:Source tonight off steam) I downloaded the Halo demo and tried it out.

In my usual 800x600 the game averaged about 80 FPS with max detail, sometimes reaching as high as 180 FPS! You can comfortably play the game on the highest available resolution at around 50FPS average, but it doesn't look much better unfortunately.

The famous "Silent Cartographer" level (In-game movie sequences are capped at 30 FPS for some reason.)



Later in the demo level.

 

how does Pes6 , demo fifa 08 or demo Medal of Honor Airborne play on it?

 

No AA & 800x600

MY EYES ARE BURNING!!!!!!!!!!!


But it does look good, other than that

 

I know you said you like lots of detail + high framerates, but could you see what settings you can run games on at 1280x800? Thanks for the screenshots so far, they look great!

 

why don't we play all games at 800x600? Whats the advantage of a higher resolution if the graphics will stay the same anyway?

 

The reason I play at 800x 600 is because when I run it at 800x600 on my screen (1280X800) it gets softened around the edges due to the LCD scaling - so no jaggies! (It's like free antiailasing)

 

nice pics.... i would really like to see halo 2 pics.

 

I love how everyones asking him to download these demos and other things haha. The Screenshots look great!

 

Hi, I´d have need of your testing: Bioshock ( demo ), Colin DIRT, Lost Planet, World Conflict ( demo )... including screens. Thank you very much

 

The Fifa 2008 Demo runs terribly, which makes no sense, because the game does not look that nice. For some reason:

• The were NO options for graphics at all. nada, zip, nil. Nothing! Not even in an external program.
• The display seemed to default to 800x600, which is a bit weird
• Anytime there were menus on screen the game would slow to about 1FPS!
• Apart from that it ran between 25-60 FPS

I can only hope the demo is a very early unoptimised version with cut-down features... Here's a shot of in-game play.



And here's a shot demonstrating the EXTREME slowdown on the menus. They are almost completely unresponsive.

 

Thanks for the screens

 

ehh i notice none of the shots are using AA, yet you still stated the shots are using AA. Although holy crap Stalker looks good on your 8400GS, now I just need to try it out on my 8600GT .

 

Just goes to show you that the 8400M GS isn't as bad as people are making them out to be!

By the way, I noticed you're playing it at 4:3 aspect ratio... doesn't the stretching bother you?

 

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R shots have AA on 2x. Although AA doesn't make much of a difference really. Yeah the 8600 GT will thrash S.T.A.L.K.E.R without missing a beat. Maybe even with dynamic lighting.

RANT: I'm not a fan of HDR and dynamic lighting in games. I don't like the way the sky in Oblivion goes super bright and washed out when you look at the ground... It may happen with camera exposure, but it sure as hell doesn't happen with your eyes! In that respect (contrast between indoors/outdoors) I think plain old non-HDR looks a lot better!

 

Not really, because when it comes down to it, it's only being stretched horizontally by about 20% across the entire image. What does annoy me is when my TV does that 'smart stretching' thing (doesn't strech the middle of the picture, but applies more stretching towards the edges of the image) it's supposed to look more natural, but produces a disturbing 'fisheye' effect when viewing things with horizontal movement - especially panning (like FPS games).

 

ok here's my contribution:
vostro 1500
1.6 ghz core 2
1 gig ram
windows xp

ghost recon advanced warfighter: everything on lowest settings, 800x600. Averages 25-30 fps, but still playable.




Halo: everything on highest detail, 1024x768. Runs perfect, no complaints at all.



counter-strike source: again everything on highest detail, 1024 x 768 and runs perfect



Half-life 2: same as halo and cs:s




madden 08 highest detail, 1024 x 768 and runs very well. As a sidenote, keyboards suck....get a controller for this game




finally, tiger woods golf 2007: everything on medium details at 800 x 600, and this wasn't as smooth as the others. It's barely noticeable but there is some lag. I put the details on lowest settings and got much better fps, and honestly couldn't tell the difference from higher settings






So i'm pretty satisfied with this card, kinda wishing i'd got the 8600 to be future-proof, but for now it runs everything that i want to play. Also getting another gig of ram should help some

 

Lots of beautiful screenshots, thanks for posting.

GRAW has absolutely abysmal coding so I would simply ignore the performance you get in it. It runs terrible on every machine I have played it on.

 

GRAW actually runs decently. It's nothing like Rainbow 6, anyways.

Why do you guys not run games at native resolution? I mean, I can see why a game like Oblivion might require lower settings (and even then, personally i'd lower settings before resolution), but CS:S runs perfectly at 1280x800 on an 8400m GS, as does a host of other games for which screenshots have been posted.

 

ok here's 3 more games. All are run at 1024x768

Age of Empires 3 Tried to run this one on high settings but it got laggy after about 1/2 hour. Screens are on medium settings and it runs pretty smoothly, gets a bit choppy towards the end of the game when you have a huge population though





GTA: san andreas Running on high detail and it looks very good. No lag or anything





TOCA Race Driver 3 Maybe i'm just retarded but i couldn't find anything to adjust the details so it's run on whatever the default is







EDIT: You guys think another gig of RAM would make a significant difference? Right now i have no problems runnings several apps, but i was wondering if it would be worth it for gaming.

 

Alright, I bit the bullet and downloaded the Bioshock Demo. Sorry but I could not bring myself to play it all the way through (I have done so about a billion times on the Xbox 360 - and have the full game now).

It took me ages to get the new Nvidia drivers installed.

Performance: I ran it in a low widescreen resolution (864X480) which looked pretty good on my screen. Details were all maxed using DX10 shaders. Unfortunately this hit performance quite hard with FPS going from 12-45. averaging at around 17.

The best performance boost you can give this demo is to remove the checkbox options in the graphics settings (high quality post processing etc). If you remove them all you get around 40FPS constantly, but the game won't look as nice. A good compromise for me was turning many of the additional options off, apart from DX10 and "High quality shaders" This looked great and kept around 30FPS constantly.

NB: I took these shots before I took everything off max - just to show how slow it can be. THe demo can be tweaked until it is playable quite easily.

Entering tower



Slow performance after fight

 

UPDATE: Fifa '08 Demo now runs perfectly after installing Nvidia 163.44 drivers from laptopvideo2go.com.

Who would have thought that upgrading the driver could have such a dramatic performance increase? (My old drivers were 101.7 I think)

 

I took a few screenshots in the bioshock demo

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2357176#post2357176

 

how does Pes6, TDU or demo Medal of Honor Airborne play on it?

 

Great thanks for the screenies, they look pretty good, i couldn't get Bioshock to run on mine but will try the fix. anyone else tried BF2142 on the 8400M-GS?

Cheers

Ninja

 

Great Job man one image is better than thousand words...keep up the good work ...can you post some Pes6 and Oblivion screenshots?
Thank you

 

I have some World Of Warcraft screenshots coming soon.. I'm extremely impressed

 

I just bought a Vostro 1400 with a 2.2 Core Duo and the 8400M GS but STALKER will not run on it at this point. I have Vista Basic on it and got STALKER from STEAM. It never runs and when I try to update the drivers it tells me that the drivers do not match the OS.

CounterStrike and BattleField 2 run just fine on it, I am probably going to load up WoW as welland do a few more tests but the whole stalker issue stinks.

 

I hate steam and i'll never install such ****...use a crack and replace original exe...If you have the original game and you've buy it you can do it! ! !

http://www.megagames.com/cracks/html/c922820_0.htm

Hope it works...

 

Does anyone know how the 8400M GS would perform in World of Conflict?

 

i just tried it tonight on low settings at 1280 x 800 and averaged 35 fps on the in game benchmark thing.
Here's my specs

C2D 1.6 ghz
8400 GS
1 gig ram
XP pro
stock drivers