Hey.

I'm going to buy a laptop next week, and was just wondering what sort of performance I can expect from integrated graphics...

I am thinking on the latest black macbook (Core 2 Duo 2.00Ghz, 1Gb DDR2 (might upgrade to 2gb later), 1280x800 resolution and an Intel GMA 950 integrated video adapter with 64mb of shared ram, running XP SP2.

Basically I'd be happy if I could un it at 1280x800 - native resolution - at a good frame rate, with level on low. The CPU is extremely powerful so this might make up for the video card. (or lack there of).

Surely there is someone else that has one, or another laptop with the Intel 950 adapter. Please let me know of your experiences.

Cheers!

meh, but the problem is many games dont support integrated graphics and thats a pain.

The 64Mb of shared ram will give it comparatively crappy 3D performance, but the joy of LFS is that that it'll still run fine despite that

Quote from JamesK :

The 64Mb of shared ram will give it comparatively crappy 3D performance, but the joy of LFS is that that it'll still run fine despite that

Thats my specs 64mb of ATI video mem integrated with 3.2ghz p4 chip @ an average of 30 - 40 fps, bareable at best.

Quote from CSU1 :

Thats my specs 64mb of ATI video mem integrated with 3.2ghz p4 chip @ an average of 30 - 40 fps, bareable at best.

Well I was under the impression that LFS used next to no video card memory as the textures were relatively small... Either way it's dynamically expandable to 224mb... But it's all crap I know.

CSU1, what resolution ?

30fps is more than bareable, lol ... anywho, its not quantity but quality that matters, my cheapy Samsung laptop has 128Mb dedicated so I'm surprised a Powerbook would be available so lowly specced.

Quote from JamesK :

30fps is more than bareable, lol ... anywho, its not quantity but quality that matters, my cheapy Samsung laptop has 128Mb dedicated so I'm surprised a Powerbook would be available so lowly specced.

Sorry, its a standard macbook. Yeah 128mb integrated graphics, 512mb integrated graphics, 1gb integrated graphics (if such a thing existed) would all be out classed by my old GeForce 2 Ti with 64mb of dedicated memory!

I was just wondering what to expect.

Right now I'm on a Dell Latititude D510 and it's some POS from the school. It has a Pentium M @ 1.6ghz, 32MB intergrated graphics controller, and 512MB DDR2 @ 533. I run LFS at 1024x768 (max res) at about 40-50fps alone, and about 30fps with a few AI in view. Hope that helped.
~Bryan~

The problem is that the Intel GMA 950 has no ,,hardware transform& lighting" and ,,hardware vertex shading" capabilities and since (as Scawen said) LFS's graphics are all about vertexes, you would get low fps at full grid or at heavy racing traffic.

Check out this review about the GMA 950's gaming performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2427

As you can see, the ATI Xpress 200M (thanks to its hardware T&L capabilities) performs much better than Intel's solution.

I had an Acer Laptop with a Celeron M CPU (OC'ed to 2 GHz for testing) with X200M graphics card. At 1024x768 screen resoltion in wheels view(medium graphics settings were applied) the system produced 18 FPS with a full grid of FZRs taking (and some of the racers crashing) 1st turn at an Aston North GP replay. The performance normalized at across 50 FPS when the drivers pulled away from each other.

Than I bought an Asus laptop which has an AMD Mobile Sempron 3400+ CPU and nVidia Go6100 VGA (with hardware vertex shading capabilities).
As I enabled hardware vertex shading option, the CPU offloaded from counting graphics, this way the new system produced 24 FPS at 1280x800 with the same Aston replay. Naturally this machine performs much better too when I see more cars front of me.

OK, so what to do?

1. Testing! Ask someone who has an Apple product with the same specifications to the one you desire to buy, for running LFS on it with a full grid of AI. Maybe the Core2Duo's performance is enough to produce acceptable performance (at least 24 fps) with the GMA 950.

2. How about collecting some more money, and buy your model with ATI x1600?
Sadly, dedicated VGA's are eating too much power compared to the integrated solutions, so prepare for qucikly depleting battery.

3. Most notebooks and laptops are not really designed for gaming (ok, so why I play on it? The answer is simple: I care only about LFS and I don't need gaming desktop PC which eats more power in idle, than my notebook at full throttle).
Using 3D applications requires powerful hardware. But more power= more heat (and more weight because of advanced cooling system) and the last but most important: poor battery performance. The result: a not really portable equipment.

4. Get the product, bulid a desktop PC for ,,backup" and playing games. Remember, a notebook is hardly (and expensively) upgradeable, unlike a desktop machine.


5. Finally let's see what happens on the integrated video market:

Intel released the GMA X3000 which could perform much better than its predecessor (4 pixel pipelines, 2 vertex pipelines, DX9 Shader Model 3).
Sadly the drivers are not really optimized yet, this way the new GMA's gaming performance is poor, but it can become better with new driver releases.

ATI started to manufacture the 690G integrated VGA (this is a half X700 with 4 pixel pipelines, no vertex pipelines, and only DX9 Shader Model 2).
I can't really recommend this product.

Nvidia will release the 7050 on the integrated VGA market, I don't know about the specifications yet.

I think IGP's will never reach the ,,horsepower" of budget dedicated VGA's, because who would buy an ATI X1300 or an NV7300 if the performance level were equal?


Good luck for making your choice, hope I could help a littlebit. (:

(And sorry everyone for my not so well english, I learned the language 12 years ago).

Even a 5 year old T41 (P-m 1.6ghz) with ATI FireGL T2 (pretty much a Radeon 9600) with dedicated memory can run LFS at 60+fps. It's really all about the dedicated memory.

Thanks alot guys for your replies, in particular Dannynet.

Up until now I have always been a desktop user, and I am well aware that no integrated graphics is going to ever come close to a dedicated graphics card.

I need to buy a laptop within the next week or two as this year I'm overseas for the year. Basically I was just wondering whether I should go for a Macbook (Intel GMA 950) or pay about $600AUD (perhaps about $400 Euro) extra for a Macbook Pro which has an ATI X1600 dedicated card with 128MB of dedicated GDDR3 ram....

I would'nt be playing LFS that much this year anyway, and will definitely go back to desktop after... So I'm thinking to go with standard Macbook, then perhaps spend the $600 on an 8800GTS and a Core 2 Duo or something when I get back home. But it sounds like I should be able to run LFS at 1280x800 on minimum details and hopefully should be playable... Lets not forget that the Macbook comes with a Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz processor

Anyway, thanks for your help guys, I'll post my findings in a week or so time.

the Macbook Pro of the Mac's would be pretty damn good, especially if you planned on playing any Windows 3D games (or running Vista...). I'm in the next week getting a 20" iMac as a secondary box to my current aging box

I've had what is about a 4 year old laptop last for me up until recently it broke . It was 2.4ghz, 1gb ram, 64mb ati card... and to be honest, it still doesn't meet up to my needs for wanting to play the newest games.

As a good suggestion, I think you shouldn't buy a laptop with integrated graphics, or anything that is below 256mb of memory on the GPU. Core 2 duo and a decent amount of memory will surely help, but what makes the laptop last is the video card, and you need to buy a laptop that is somewhat recent... unfortunately. Because the cost wont be 'cheap'. But you have to invest that much to have the laptop last you 3 to 4 years. I bought my laptop back in 2002/2003 BRAND NEW (for $2,700 :o), and it was great for all the games at the time up until greater DX9 features came about, I slowly was becoming obsolete and unable to play newer games... which is why I've stuck around here in LFS so often.

But my point is, games change, and I doubt you will want a 64mb onboard chipset for video performance... LFS could likely change its requirements soon enough, you never know. But you DON'T want to be left out of the loop when you buy a laptop, that's something you need to look out for... and something you will really dislike having to deal with once it gets old (unless money isn't a problem for you).

Which is why I am really no longer investing in laptops, and going to build a new desktop soon. Its the only way to go when you want an overall excellent performer, for a lower price. Laptops are great for travel and taking them places, I did just that with mine... but to be honest, it stayed home on my desk most of the time... as if it was a dekstop.

EDIT: Overall laptops can be great for gaming if you have the newest things. The laptop will quickly become obsolete, so it really is a money pit to have to pay nearly twice as much for a laptop that is about half the performance of a desktop you could get for the same price. If anything, I will only buy laptops from now on that are decent tools for travel and multimedia. I can't be arsed to have a laptop suited for gaming... they JUST aren't practical machines.

I've got a HP TC4400 Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, Intel 945 GMA, 1GB RAM and Tablet XP SP2 and running a few tests for you I got the following:

Settings:

(hardware vertex is not available as already mentioned above)
high res +mirror
user 0.80
mirror 0.20
dust 1.00

full size textures
full car and helmet skins

z-buffer 24
simple track off

FPS:

15 - 20 back of full grid on SO (AI's - this may have impacted the fps possibly??)
30 - 40 in front

20 - 30 back of full grid on WE (AI's - this may have impacted the fps possibly??)
30 - 40 in front

Even though the 15-20 is low, its still playable. Playing around with these settings e.g. dust and high res setting would give me slightly better performance, but to be honest when you go over 25 - 30fps then the frame rate is pretty smooth anyway so personally I'm not bothered that I don't get 40+ fps.

Hope this helps....

/edit - I just joined SO1 with 8 racers and got 60 fps - FYI

I loaded LFS on a Dell M90, dual core-2.0gH P4, 1gig of Ram, 512meg video card. I had AA and AF turned the whole way up and every graphic option maxed.....90-110fps.