Poor 3200 performance

I am just curious as to why the ATI Radeon HD 3200 perform poorly compared to the 8400m GS. I thought the card was on par with most low end decrete card?

The notebook I had was the HP TX2525nr and the game I tried was quake war. The notebook could barely run in low setting/800x600 without dropping frame when there are action going on. However, it was still playable. Running around and shooting the air seen fine though. This was both stock/latest driver with both x86/x64 windows vista ultimate (Tweaked). The x64 did run the game better.

The 8400M GS in my m1330 could run the game at native res/low-medium setting with little to no fps drop.

Edit: Forgot the spec.
TX2525nr Spec:
12.1" WXGA
AMD Turion X2 RM-70
3 GB Ram DDR2 677
250 HDD 5400 RPM
ATI Radeon HD 3200

 

The card is integrated, any discrete solution would give it a run for it's money. The HD3200 is about five times more powerful than the X3100, so it isn't weak by any standard.

 

Try chaning your power plan to high performance

 

Not to disrepect anyone there knowlegde on the subject, but I am not an "average" user, I am trying to figure out why the 3200 could not run quake war with similar setting to an 8400m GS smoothly when there are action going about. I know bendmark show the 3200 have potential and can match even mid range card. Which is why I am baffle with its performance with a 2007 game.

I am aware of the difference between the Intergrated and Dedicated. But when you have members on this forum praising the card potential and alway saying the ati 3200 = 8400m GS or even better which can be misinforming those who are in the market for a new notebook for light gaming. Just as most member have said, benmarking is not alway the best way too judge a computer's prowess but real life usage.

Thanks King but I have tried high performance/disable powerplay but no go.

Sorry if this post sound like I am frustrated and taking it out on you guys.

 

Are you using the latest graphics driver from HP? If you are, don't, go get the latest one directly from ATI. Secondly, open up the CCC and make sure you're set to max performance, not max battery. Thirdly, isn't QW an OpenGL game (ATI seems to lag behind in OGL).

 

I believe your onto someting here, if QW is utilizing OpenGL then that would explain a lot about the poor performance. Thank you +rep. Hmm, made me kind of regret returning the tx2525nr the other day if that the case. Would you say games like the souce engine are OpenGL as well? I don't mind buying another notebook with an ATI card if I can play games like CSS, Half Life, etc on low-medium settings.

 

Source games use directx

 

The HD 3200 runs Halflife 2 at maxed settings without AA fine.

 

Another contributing factor is that ATI cards tend to score better at synthetic benchmarks, so that might have been somewhat misleading.

 

Thanks everyone for the input. So overall, nvidia for opengl/directx and ati for directx until they catch up on there open source drivers.