Will the 256MB ATI mobility Radeon HD2600 play these games?

Hi

Below are the basic specifications of the notebook
im very interested in buying.

CPU: Intel centrino core 2 Duo T7250 (2.0Ghz)
RAM: 2048MB DDR2 RAM
HDD: 200GB Hard Drive
GPU: 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600
Display: 17" TFT Trubright WXGA Display (1440x900)
OS: Windows vista home premium

Im not a hard core pc gamer and am not interested
in playing games at high resolutions, however i would like
the games to look reasonably good and play smoothly
so could anyone possibly please tell me will the
256MB ATI mobility Radeon HD2600 play the following games:

Aliens vs Predator
Aliens vs Predator 2
BF:2142
Doom 3
Farcry
Halo
Halo 2
Oblivian + Expansions
Resident Evil Series
Star Wars: Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2
Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast
Star wars: Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Academy
Star Wars: KOTOR
Star Wars: KOTOR 2
Star Wars: Empire at War
Worms 2
Worms Armageddon
Worms Forts under siege
Worms World Party
Worms 3D
Worms 4: Mayhem

I would appreciate any help you could give me

Thankyou

 

Well, you should be quitte sure that you can play these games. the only one I am not sure about is HALO2 (never played it).

 

I will assume a 1280x800 resolution
AVP -max
AP2- max
BF2142 old game, should work perfectly
Farcry med/high
Halo - high
Halo 2- beats me man,never tried it
Oblivion - med/high
Resident evil med/high if not high
Star wars - you should have no problem with any of them
Worms (armageddon,2etc) - lol. max
Your system if mid/performance so you should be able to play any of the older games just fine(2006 and older) . Newer ones...med settings usually,or low/med.

 

Having owned a laptop with a Radeon Mobility X1600 256MB DDR3, i can say that any of those games mentioned above you will be able to play at maximum settings at your native resolution without any problems. HD2600 is more powerful than the X1600 and i was able to run all of those games on the X1600 at max settings at 1680xwhatever resolution. Except for BF2142.

 

u will be easily be able to play all those games

 

Thanks for all your help so far guys.
Looking at the specs again there's something
i forgot to mention and that is apparantly
the ATI mobility Radeon HD2600
has 256MB Dedicated graphics + (1023mb Hypermemory)
as a graphic card novice could you tell me what this means
and weather or not this effects how the games i mentioned will run?

 

Basically, the graphics card has 256mb graphics memory in-built to the card, and it is capable of using around 768mb of your RAM for more memory.

 

I see, so having 256MB of built in memory
and 1023MB of Hypermemory is a good thing?

 

It is a good thing. HOWEVER!!! Your RAM is DDR2, if your VRAM is DDR3, then the clock speeds of the two memories do no match. This means that the performance will be directly affected. If your VRAM is DDR2 just like your RAM, then there will be no noticable performance difference. The GPU will resort to using its HyperMemory when needed taking a chunk out of the systems RAM. This, in certain machines, gives you little advantage because the GPU might not even know how to use the hypermemory. Im not exactly sure if your HD2600 will properly address the huge amount of HyperMemory. Regardless, it is always a good thing to have more VRAM, dedicated or not.

 

Do you know if the VRAM on the 256MB HD2600
is DDR2 OR DDR3?

 

This depends on the manufacturer. Some will put DDR2 in your machine and some will make DDR3 available to you. For instance, my GF 8600m GT comes in both configurations. ASUS places DDR3 whereas CERTAIN OTHER (lets not point fingers) cut you short with DDR2. The performance difference is approximately 1000 3DMARK 06 points. Thats a lot.
Make sure to purchase a laptop with DDR3.

 

The 3Dmark score is more like 600-700 points, not 1000.

 

Halo 2 you should be fine.

I think an IGP can run it also.

I played it, nothing graphically at all to it. Sadly.

 

Ive seen a post on the NBR Asus forum in which the author claimes to have observed a 1000 point difference between DDR2 and DDR3. Perhaps the info is somewhat on par with ****aky mushrooms.

 

That's one of the most outrageous and misinformed statements I've ever seen.

DDR2 and DDR3 offer different performance, but if your GPU has DDR 2, and your system RAM is DDR 2 won't make a difference. The limiting factor is the bus that the GPU can talk to the system RAM. It is not only significantly slower (in terms of clock speed) but also it has to share the same bus with the CPU.

 

So your saying that having DDR2 RAM for HyperMemory/TurboCache and dedicated DDR3 VRAM is not a problem lol?

 

Yeah... they OCed those cards. Read the fine print.

Avg DDR2 - 3100
Avg GDDR3 - 3600-3800

 

If you are unsure of whether your graphics card is DDR2 or DDR3, then download GPU-Z from this link.

It will tell you various things about your graphics card, including whether it is DDR2 or DDR3 etc.

 

No it isn't because:

A) The HD2600 won't be able to use all 256mb of RAM while maintaining a playable FPS.
B) Virtual memory is so far away from the video card that memory latency will be far less than that of onboard GDDR2 RAM in the first place, so basically if your going over all your dedicated video RAM you should just turn down the settings (very rare).

 

Main reason for Hypememory is to avoid texture swaps and such, and to make available the textures from the system memory-Hypermemory chunk instead of swapping them and uncompressing/recompressing them from the HDD.

If like me you have ample memory (anything under 1GB system memory is more of an issue), then the system dynamically using some Hypermemory is a good thing, and always a good thing, since like TurboCache it is biased towards system performance, so if it need it more in the host that's where it goes, but if it has it to spare then it'll use it for extended VRAM whcih uses a portion of the PCIe lanes to act as a 64bit memory channel through the chipset bypassing the CPU.

It's definitely better than the VPU going through your CPU to your HDD for resources constantly swapping out.

It still won't act like having 1GB of VRAM but it will act better than if it only had 256MB of VRAM alone.

 

I had a Radeon 9000 64MB AGP card on my Athlon XP 3000+ computer and I played AVP2 fine. I know the HD2600 will have no problem with it. I hope this helps. God Bless

 

Im very happy that this card will play all of my current pc games
but how well will the 256MB ATI mobility Radeon HD2600
handle future games like Far Cry 2?

 

Far Cry 2 will likely struggle. At the most expect a similar experience to your card's performance in Crysis.

 

I am able to do Crysis at medium setting at 1280xwhatever widescreen with DX10 enabled and the framerates are decent (GeForce 8600m GT). As far as im concerned, the HD2600 is somewhat similar in performance to the 8600m GT. Or at least its claimed to be. Look at some benchmarks on-line. Im sure there is a chart somewhere out there showing different framerates for different GPUs.

 

think you could play all list on your laptop

 

Continue this conversation in the sticky that's dedicated to questions asked by the original poster. People need to start noticing the sticky threads around here.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157766