I am currently at college using a laptop with a really shitty Intel GMA 950. I unfortunately bought it a little too early, since the new Intels are actually quite powerful (The X3100s IIRC) and support Hardware T&L and the other crap that makes GMA 950s so painful.
Now, I'm sure some of you have had experiences with playing games on a similar PC. I'm sure some of you found awesome games anyway that you liked. Some of them might even have been recent.
I'm asking for help finding games that will run on an Intel GMA 950. My comp has 2 gigs of RAM and a Core 2 Duo proc, so if it runs it'll probably run well. I play pretty much everything now besides sims (no stick) and sports games, although I don't play adventure games much, so pretty much any genre is fine. What I'm most looking for are good recent FPSes or RTSes (although "recent" for FPSes can be stretched. A lot.) that will run on it.
The games have to be Vista compatible, otherwise there isn't much of any point, too.
Any good suggestions?
I have no graphics card and I must game...
Moderator: Thanas
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MJ12 Commando
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You wouldn't be much more in luck with a x3100 - its as sucktastic as ever - while potentially not crashing do to hardware incompatibility, in any game that uses shaders (which is pretty much every game today) it turns into a slideshow of around 1-5FPS (for example, some people managed to hack EUIII enough to get over the standard intel incompatibilities and the result was yet again far, far inferior to even the lowest integrated ATi/nVidia card, and that is a game with very simple graphics who's only complexity comes from actually exploiting the shader capability mandatory in dx9).
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MJ12 Commando
- Padawan Learner
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- Joined: 2007-02-01 07:35am
That's IIRC a driver issue not a hardware issue. As far as hardware goes it's a fairly potent integrated graphics chip.
Although the shader slideshow thing I'm inclined to at least partially disbelieve. I can run FEAR on medium settings (high textures) and 1280 X 800 on my laptop at 25-30 FPS, and that's with a GMA 950. I'm more inclined to attribute it to how the shader engine in EUIII is programmed rather than the graphics card being shitty (since an even shittier graphics card can do much better).
Although the shader slideshow thing I'm inclined to at least partially disbelieve. I can run FEAR on medium settings (high textures) and 1280 X 800 on my laptop at 25-30 FPS, and that's with a GMA 950. I'm more inclined to attribute it to how the shader engine in EUIII is programmed rather than the graphics card being shitty (since an even shittier graphics card can do much better).
Take the current date. Subtract 3-4 years. The games that came at that time are the ones you can play on a basic computer today, barring OS issues.
You'll be able to play (on low settings) Dawn of War + expansions, America's Army, UT2k4, Republic Commando, and so on.
EDIT:
Also, get Mount and Blade. It's great, inexpensive, and low-resource.
You'll be able to play (on low settings) Dawn of War + expansions, America's Army, UT2k4, Republic Commando, and so on.
EDIT:
Also, get Mount and Blade. It's great, inexpensive, and low-resource.
I'm a little weary of suggestion UT2k4. IIRC, it had some decent GPU requirements (although nowheres near the top of the line for the day). I don't have that many newer games that would run on such a system (orange box and battlefield 2142 are my two latest purchases), so I may very well be mistaken, and my old computer has a radeon 9800 which can (barely) run far cry, so I was running much more GPU intensive games already.
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