How far will the GMA 950 go?

With the most updated drivers and max shared RAM (128) whats the best game you guys think I could play on low settings? I have a laptop coming with the GMA 950, I have a desktop for gaming but I want to do some light gaming when I'm away from home.

 

Not very far...

 

Erm..sims 2? There are videos on youtube of people playing half life 2 on thier macbooks which have a gma 950 (using bootcamp) and they appear to display without a lag but I doubt they look very good and you wouldn't have a very good experience.

 

...thanks for your input usapatriot.

But thanks steve, I play half-life 2 on my desktop on med-low settings smoothly with my Radeon 9550 but I'll see how that works because I didnt even think the 950 could run it. I do like playing Half-life 1 and mods so thats good. Thanks again.

 

Well, I have a GMA 950 in my Vaio and it runs Command and Conquer 3 on medium settings. Most of the other newer games don't even run because Shaders are required.

 

Hmmm, stick to the older games for a good time. I've found in terms of modern games, Dawn of War/Winter Assault/Dark Crusade work pretty well on low-medium settings. All Dx8 titles work well, Soldier of Fortune 2, Return to Castle Wolfentstein, etc...alot of older dx9 titles like Call of Duty also work fine.

Half Life 2 is just about playable, on lowest settings and dx7 mode, you'll get by if needs be.

As you say, Half Life original is still a fantastic game, and will present no problems to the GMA. I actually started playing Day of Defeat last night again (The old one, not source) and it's amazing how great it still is to play after all these years.

As long as you have a desktop for gaming, I think you'll survive with your laptops GMA.

 

As a general rule of thumb, any game from about 2003 and older should run okay. Most after that will not. The 'best' games I managed to pull off were Farcry on low settings and Neverwinter Nights and low-medium settings.

 

You have a desktop for gaming with a 9550? Thats really not that great at all for gaming.

 

It's also heavily dependent on your CPU. If you have a good CPU, like the Core 2 Duo T7300 and better. Basically, the peformance difference in games with two different CPUs will be equal to their performance difference in more CPU intensive apps. My E6600 is 3-4x faster than the Celeron D 2.53GHz at everything. Though with laptops, the worst you can do is the Core Duo based Celerons, which aren't that bad.

Try to enable "max DVMT" or whatever, the maximum supported is 224MB. If your laptop hardware allows you(unlike desktops, sometimes manufacturers limit the max amount and put a fixed one so they can advertise ).

 

Yeah I know, but thats the best I could do at the time. Before i go to college i plan on building my own for more extreme gaming. The 9550 does what i need it to with Doom 3, Half-life 2, Condemned etc...

But yeah the cpu is a T2300 with 2MB cache so we'll see, thanks for your help guys.

 

Can this card play FEAR then on lowest settings. My girlfriend wants to try it out.

 

GMA950 Screenshot Thread

FEAR, despite Intel's claims, is totally out of the question sorry.