RESULTS: Oblivion on Intel GMA 900

Just thought I could post this for a few laughs. This card has finally and utterly disappointed me for the last time.

I will be getting a new notebook soon (see my sig for info), and decided to purchase Oblivion a few days prior to receiving my new gaming (work) machine. Just for the fun of it, I installed Oblivion and attempted to run the game.

The following settings were used:
*Video Quality: Very Low @ 640x480 resolution.
*All distance drawing, bloom, and anything else was either off or at the lowest settings.
*The Oldblivion patch was installed and again all minimum settings were choosen.

RESULTS
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*Oblivion failed to start, regardless of settings used and programs running in the background.
*This occurred in both window and full-screen mode.
*Oldblivion can emulate hardware T&L. Play was attempted with the setting both on and off, as the GMA 900 driver already includes this feature.
*Most settings were toggled with, but it was futile.

There are multiple websites reporting intermittent successes and failures, but I'm inclined to believe it will never work. I cannot find a single report of a GMA 900 working, and that also lists the steps taken in order to get it working so that the claim can be proven.

When Oldblivion fails to get this card working, and the patch is designed to get some *very old* cards operational, it says something about the age of the hardware design of the GMA 900...it's old and very outdated.

In short, this GPU is utterly and completely useless for gaming...end of rant!
If anyone has actually gotten this to work, please let us know!

Just for the record, I'm not suprised by these results.

 

So much for playing Oblivion on my lappy...

 

I wonder if a GMA 950 and a Core Duo would have any better luck. Probably not much. The GMA900/950 were never designed to run something like Oblivion no matter what the marketing people may say.

 

I wouldn't say the 900 is COMPLETELY useless. You could probably still play some old games on it. Some of those classics are awsome.

 

well...anything about three years old (or more) should work fine (albeit at low settings still). however, the classics do run okay on them.

i'm just a little frustrated with the modern games. and i'm not so sure the 950 will do much better, since i think it is only a chipset (not feature) upgrade other than an increase in speed. the X3000 chipset MIGHT do better though...we'll see.

but i still won't trust intel GPUs...not for a LONG time.

 

I wonder if there is a big difference speed-wise between desktop GMAs and mobile GMAs. I know that the desktop GMA 900 runs at 333MHz and the desktop GMA 950 runs at 400MHz. Usually when people quote performance of games using GMAs they are talking about the desktop versions. I don't know the exact clock speeds of the mobile GMAs, but I'm pretty sure they are clocked lower because of thermal and power restrictions. Perhaps the sporatic reports of Oldblivion/3DAnalyze success with GMAs are for the (slightly) more powerful desktop versions rather than the mobile versions?

 

the GMA950 sucks. i manage to play Warcraft III (max settings), NFS:Most Wanted (med settings), Battlefield 1942 (max settings), Star Wars:Battlefront2(med settings), FIFA2005 (max), Winning Eleven 8(max), Quake 4(low settings). These games keep me happy though BF2 failed to run .

Has any1 tried Half life2?

 

Being able to run Quake 4 at all is not bad at all for the GMA 950. At least I never thought it had it in it. Have you tried WoW?

I don't have a GMA 950 so I can't comment on HL2 but I'm not hopeful. Even Intel themselves claims it crashes during game play.

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel945gm/sb/CS-022051.htm

Intel released a new driver a few weeks ago, their first update for the 945GM in 5 months, so maybe that combined with the latest game patch may solve things.

It's interesting that HL2 supposedly runs on the desktop GMA 950 although with low frame rates in outdoor scenes.

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel945g/sb/CS-021333.htm

That seems to support the notion that the desktop GMAs are faster than the mobile versions, although faster desktop components like hard drives probably also help. I thought I read somewhere that the mobile GMA 950 was only clocked at 250MHz, which seems excessively low considering the desktop version is pretty power and heat efficient and is clocked at 400MHz. This would mean that the mobile GMA 900 is probably only clocked at 200MHz, which would definitely explain why even Oldblivion doesn't run on mobile GMA 900s.

 

HL2 runs fine on it, is my understanding.

Quake 4, though? Really? What kinds of framerates did you get? I remember towards the end even at 640x480 low on my old X600, it still got a little bit bumpy at times.

 

Well, you do know that Oblivion is just about the most demanding game out at the moment?
I'm not sure I'd call it "disappointing" that the slowest integrated GPU on the market fails to run it.

And yeah, HL2 would run on anything down to my old TI-82 calculator.

 

LOL @ ^

the worst gpu would probably be ones made by SiS

the mirage is god awful

i think the GMA would still own the SiS

 

God yeah. The Mirage 2 is still in loads of really cheap laptops and it is worse then the GMA. A few days ago I discovered a graphics card called "Castle Rock 64mb" - anyone ever heard of that, cos I haven't.....it can't even Run Quake III.

I mean what an earth is the point of a 64mb card that can't even run a game that runs on a 16mb card.

But in fairness Night_2004 you have no reason to be "disappointed" as such with the GMA. It isn't designed for games simply put. When you think about it logically, you wouldn't buy an X200, which is designed for low end gaming, and then whinge that it didn't run whatever on high settings would you? Or you wouldn't buy a cheap car and then complain it didn't reach 120mph.

The GMA is not advertised as a gaming carad, but at least it can run older games great like Quake III, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor etc. With the predecessor to the GMA, Intel Extreme, not even older games worked unless they were really ancient titles, so even though you might not realise how lucky you are, the GMA is a big step forward from what you'd have gotten a few years back.

Count yourself lucky you can play anything, and learn the lesson that if you plan on gaming, get a gaming orientated card. The GMA takes so much flak, for something it was never intended to do. Kinda bugs me really.

 

You could try it with 3DAnalyze. That's meant to be able to emulate a lot of features which the GPU can't do (or just disable them - so you don't see some parts of the image, but it runs faster). The only card I've tried which hasn't worked with that is the 2.5MB NeoMedia 256AV in my laptop (it doesn't work because 3DAnalyze is expecting basic 3D capabilities - and that card is a pure 2D one).

Nvidia also have a tool called NVEmulate which can be used to run DX9 applications on older cards - but it only works on Nvidia cards. This does support full DX9 shader emulation even on DX7 cards - it's just very slow, because CPUs aren't very good at that sort of thing.