Think the 3100m can handle Half Life games? (orange box)

I'm looking to play Portal and Episode 1+2 once I get my thinkpad in as I recently purchased the Orange Box.

Anyone try it? I'm thinking that half life 2 based games should be good, they've run smooth on crappier video cards before. I'd like to run high settings.

Any input is appreciated.

 

the radeon 3650 is only a little bit more powerful than the 3100, and my t500 runs ep2 at 1920x1080 all highest (no AA) with what feels like 20-30 fps(very playable but not perfectly smooth).
if you run at lower resolutions I think you should be able to max out source games without AA.

 

Yeah i think i can confidently say the 3100M will deffinitely play the Orange Box series fluently and with high-highest settings to boot, to put it in perspective, even the ATI X300M in my old ThinkPad T43 (using right now ) with a Pentium M 760 (2GHz) could run that series at 20-30FPS on low to medium-ish settings.

 

The question now is will it run portal 2 at a decent frame rate?

 

Or just cause 2?

 

Valve games always have a wide range of scalability to it.

I had an old GeForce 4 Mx440se which could play half-life 2 without any lags but the settings were set at a direct x 8 mode...


So if it doesn't play well enough for you on the 3100m, just change the dx level from 10-9 to 8 for example. This might do the trick, but the visual candies will all be lowered. You can find how to do that on the net.

 

Thanks for the input guys. Yeah I'm getting the feeling that I should have no problem playing the Orange Box games, and MAYBE Portal 2 but we'll have to see benchmarks obviously. I have a PS3 so hopefully they'll release it on there eventually....

If theres one game series I feel every PC owner should have, it's the half life series. It's just synonymous with PC gaming. I love it.

 

Probably not very well. The Source engine (i.e Valve) is extremely scalable and well made. You can run Valve's games on the crappiest of hardware and they still tend to look decent.

Unlikely, Valve has pledged to not release games on the PS3 after the terrible quality of the Orange Box when they outsourced its PS3 development. And besides, as you said, Valve games are meant for the PC (a much stronger community, mods, Steam, free DLC, etc).

Portal 2 should run just fine. It's using the same engine (I would think).

 

There's a video on YouTube somewhere of someone playing MW2 pretty smoothly on the integrated graphics. So I'm sure that the 3100 will be able to play the half life games.

Edit: I found the video.

 

Some guy benchmarked the new Core i5/i3 integrated GPUs and they can run MW2 on low settings at around 30 FPS (at a low resolution). Running the Orange Box, they should fare even better.

 

Hopefully Just Cause 2 will run decently on low - mid settings since I've been getting pretty hooked and would like my laptop to play it for when I travel.

What exactly is the 3100 comparable to? For example, an NVIDIA 9400 or an ATI Radeon 3650

 

You can compare it with GeForce G210M / 310M
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-NVS-3100M.24738.0.html

Here is a benchmark list:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

How is the battery life in comparism to the intel graphic?

 

Hi,

I just played HF2 from Orange Box. Game run great on the highest details, even with 2xMSAA. But just now after 30min of playing game stuck, I had to force to close it. In event log, there is warning of display driver:

Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

I played HF2 about 1 hour totally, I hope that this will not happen again, but I have sneaking suspicion that It will ...

 

you should update the video driver to latest version.

 

Yikes. I hope its not the Quadro drivers getting picky with what application wants usage...

Post back here later and let us know how it works out. It sounds like a software thing. In which case it can be worked out.

 

Unfortunately I got the last version from Lenovo. Drivers directly from NVidia can't be installed, afaik.