silicon pop culture!

As you all know, the Sony TR-series uses integrated graphics dubbed Extreme Graphics 2 (aka Montara) built into the the Intel 855GM chipset. It’s a DirectX 8 capable graphics accelerator however, it lacks any hardware Transform and Lighting capabilities limiting some of its performance.

I ran a few tests to demonstrate what you can expect from this chipset.

As you can see, Quake 3 performance really isn’t so bad. I ran the program with the default settings so it’s possible to squeeze out more frames per second with a little tweaking. The above benchmarks indicate 32-bit color mode. Running at 16-bit color increases frame rates another 10 frames per second. Also, I only tested with widescreen resolutions since the engine supports it.

Unreal’s engine is much more demanding and even at 640x480 (with default settings) the gameplay is decent but no spectacular. I played for a while and it was ok but not nearly as fluid and fun as Quake 3.

I also ran a few other games to see how well it plays. I don’t have exact performance numbers for these games but I’ll leave you with some of my observations.

Serious Sam: Second Encounter - performance at 640x480 is pretty good and playable. Anything higher starts to get a little choppy. 800x600 isn’t too bad but 1024x768 is not playable at all.

Neverwinter Nights - You can run this at native resolutions of 1024x600 and 1280x768 but performance might be a little slow. At 1024x600, performance is good once you start playing. It starts out choppy but smooths out once it starts running. You do have to run the game at the “fastest” settings (equating to lowest graphic quality) but the game still looks pretty decent.

Warcraft III - This game plays very well at 800x600 and even at 1024x768. I was pleasantly happy to find this out. 800x600 is the best though and you can play it in 16 or 32-bit color although 16-bit will be better when things get crazy.

If anyone else has good experiences with gaming on their Sony TRs then please share with us the game and how the experience is.

Ok, I was so excited with my TR1A when i got it i had to try my best games, though i cannot give FPS, i will give you a brief discription…

Rise of Nations - Played well, little coppy when i got lots of units, but it played very good on basic settings…

Empire Earth - Plays Great

Command & Conquer Generals - Yeah Right, Not Gonna Happen, Very Very Coppy

Final Fantasy 7 & 8 PC Version, Plays Excellent “Need Update Patches to play”

Delta Force Black hawk Down - Choppy, Somewhat playabe on lowest settings

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 & Tiberian Sun - Plays Great!

COME ON PEOPLE, LETS HEAR YOU GAME EXPERIENCES!

tried to play quake 3 on mine, and all I got was “unable to load opengl subsystem”

any ideas?

got directx 9 installed, and latest video drivers

Gadget

don’t worry… its all good… figured it out now…. and plays fine!!!  just waiting on that extra 512Mb Ram…

Intel has posted a list of games that are compatible with the 855GM chipset used in the Sony TR1/2/3 notebooks. This is pretty comprehensive so you may want to check there to see if a game can run on the graphics chipset.

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/gaming/82852.htm

In cases where the game doesn’t work, they provide some basic reasoning why it doesn’t work. If a game requires hardware T&L then it will fail to run on our TRs since the built-in chipset doesn’t have a hardware T&L unit.

[quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]Intel has posted a list of games that are compatible with the 855GM chipset used in the Sony TR1/2/3 notebooks. This is pretty comprehensive so you may want to check there to see if a game can run on the graphics chipset.

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/gaming/82852.htm

In cases where the game doesn’t work, they provide some basic reasoning why it doesn’t work. If a game requires hardware T&L then it will fail to run on our TRs since the built-in chipset doesn’t have a hardware T&L unit.

anyone know or have tried to play KOTOR on tr2 ..?

[quote author=“zen_vaio”]anyone know or have tried to play KOTOR on tr2 ..?

According to the specs of the game (from the website)

Graphics Card: 32 MB OpenGL 1.4 compatible PCI or AGP 3D Hardware Accelerator with Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L) Capability required

The TR doesn’t have Hardware T&L so this game will most likely not work or not work well. I’ve tried Neverwinter Nights on my TR and it’s barely playable unless you run at the lowest resolution and turn off all graphics options. It uses the same engine (though slightly less demanding) as KOTOR so I think that you won’t have a very good experience playing the game (assuming it will run at all).

Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil doesn’t work on the TR. I just tried it.  :(  It’s ok though…i finished it already using my desktop. 

Nobody on this board has probably heard of it, but my favorite RTSs of all time, Freedom Force, works in 1024x768… albeit kind of slowly.

And a big waaaah-TAAAAAH to gr00vy for the :ph34r:

[quote author=“Anonymous”]Does anyone know whether Icewind Dale II will work on my TR2A?  Thanks.

Yes, it runs fine for me! And I’m only running a TR1AP…so you should have no problem at all.

SimCity 4: Yes
KOTOR: No

I for one am running Final Fantasy XI on my TR2 just fine… although I use a 3rd party program to trick the game into thinking I have Hardware T&L by tweaking the bit that’s reported. The game seems to run fine with the program. It wouldn’t run or install even without the tweak. Don’t remember the name of the program off hand though.

Even if this works for you as well, don’t expect awesome performance… It’s a big difference between my athlon XP 2800+ with a radeon 9800 and my Tr2

[quote author=“fibrizo”]although I use a 3rd party program to trick the game into thinking I have Hardware T&L by tweaking the bit that’s reported.

Any chance you remember what this program is? Or where you got it? I’ve been looking for something like that for a while…but I can’t seem to find anything relevant.

I’d be interested in the hack as well, portable gaming is a great way to kill time.

On an unrelated note…console emulation programs work really great on my TR1. I use Magic Engine (PC-Engine/TurboGFX emulator), SNES9x/ZSNES (SNES Emulator), and NESticle (NES Emulator). All of these run really well and can kill time really easily. I love old school games! Mindless fun! 

Indeed, I just finished Super Metroid and it brought back a lot of memories. I received a USB game controller for Christmas, so no more sore wrists and cramped fingers!