Radeon Xpress 200m and Civilization 4

I'm thinking about buying a new Compaq v2000z and was wondering if the Radeon Xpress 200m will be good enough to run Civilization 4? I don't need to run it at it's highest settings, just smooth enough to play.

 

My guess is it will probably run if especially if you bump the memory up.

 

I would look into another laptop. The Xpress 200m is a TERRIBLE graphics card. My suggestion look into other laptop companies and i bet you could get a 10x better laptop for cheaper from another company.

 

I think it will be fluid enough to play at lower resolutions and settings, as long as you have enough RAM to alot to the video card, since it shares memory.

But, nonetheless, it is better to have a dedicated graphics card to play games. I recommend (14" widescreens) the Compal EFL-30 and the Asus W3V (expensive), or for 15.4", the HP dv4000/Compaq V4000t.

 

I would love to get a computer with a better graphics card, but I have a budget of $900 or less. I already have a desktop for most of my gaming needs. Civilization 4 is just a game that I would like to be able to play on the road.

 

This is also a question of mine. I would be very gratefull to hear from anyone with the 200m running Civ4 or AOE3. I am thinking of buying the Livestrong model in particular (1024Mb ram) I don't care too much about how fast it is just whether it will run.

Anyone out there Know if this card has hardware T&L???

I've found a lot of info on this site so thanks to all you guys.

 

I have the L2000 (ML30, 512mb (128 shared) and ATI 200M) and Civ4 runs on it. I have no idea how many frames per second it was getting, but it didn't seem bad with medium details on everything and running at 1024x768 using the ati drivers from hp.com. I haven't played the game before, but it played fine starting a new civilization and also running the Desert War Scenario. I mostly play FPS games (which I don't try to run on the laptop), but Civ4 doesn't seem to be a graphically demanding game and has ran fine during the limited time I've tried on my L2000.
*edit - I also did the "Unpacking the Art Pack File" as described in the last section here (didn't try it before unpacking because I read ATI cards needed to do this - it may have worked fine without doing this, but I don't know): http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support_ati.htm

 

Thanks for your help. The game doesn't seem too graphically demanding. I just wanted to make sure before I purchased something.

 

Glad to hear someone able to play this game, makes me a little bit more sure of my purchase. Thanks!

 

Last week, I went to my local Staples store and had the salesman run the test from www.srtest.com on every laptop on display. Only those equipped with the Intel chipset failed.

Looking for a cheap laptop that could run CivIV, I bought a Toshiba Satellite M50 last week-end ($1000CAD). It's equipped with an ATI Xpress 200M GPU (32/128), 1.5 Ghz Celeron M and 512Mb of RAM.

Last night, I played two-thirds of the tutorial (now at 1140AD) at default settings and only a couple of small hiccups (less than a second each) occured during my turn.

I'm not sure how well it will handle a full-fledged game but I'm pretty confident.

 

Started a full-featured size game last night. Went on to the Renaissance.

The X200M is definitely sufficient. The 512Mb of RAM is not: heavy disk trashing occuring. I recommend upgrading the RAM to 1Gb.

 

I applied the recommendations from the dummy guide on notebook optimization and lowered the graphics to medium across the board.

I restarted the game and am now in the industrial age. CivIV runs smoothly.

I guess I'll postpone the RAM upgrade...

 

Very cool. The only game that was really choppy so far on mine is Call of Duty 2. At all the lowest settings, it still ran a little choppy.

But need for speed & xmen run pretty good. I haven't tried many other games yet.