which laptop gfx cards have known problems with wz2100?

[fisk0]

I'm planning to buy a cheap laptop soon, and since I have seen some threads here about some laptop graphics adapters not showing textures or not loading the game at all, I'd like to know which I should avoid, and possibly which of the common graphics adapters on cheap laptops I should try to get if there are some that handles warzone 2100 and other older opengl games especially well. I'll probably run Ubuntu on the machine, if that makes any difference. Possibly dual boot with XP or Vista.

The gfx adapters I see most often on the specs for the machines I'm looking at are:
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M / HD4500 / Mobile Intel X4500HD
NVIDIA GeForce 8200M
Mobile Intel GL40 Express
ATI Radeon™ Xpress 1200
ATI Radeon™ HD 3200

[cybersphinx]

Regarding the Linux suitability of those:

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M / HD4500 / Mobile Intel X4500HD
Mobile Intel GL40 Express

Those had problems with Warzone. I think with current drivers it works, but it might take some time until those arrive in Ubuntu.

NVIDIA GeForce 8200M

Needs the binary Nvidia driver for 3D, which supposedly works well if it works.

ATI Radeon™ HD 3200

This needs Ati's binary driver for 3D, which might have problems with newer kernels (since it is written for enterprise distributions that don't usually run the newest kernels). Open source 3D will be available in some months, plus some more to get it fast and stable.

ATI Radeon™ Xpress 1200

Same as above for the binary driver. It has open source 3D support, but being an integrated bastard chip with (iirc) r400 3D part and r500 2D part that isn't that common, that is sometimes broken and not quite as stable as support for "real" graphics cards.

(I'm running the open source driver for a Radeon X800 and 9600XT. I have a 740G (similar to the 1200) on one mainboard, that didn't work well about 6 months ago with the open source drivers, and the binary drivers didn't like my kernel. No personal experience with other drivers.)

[Zarel]

Regarding the Windows suitability of those:
Everything except the Intel cards will work fine.

[fisk0]

thank you for your replies guys!
I'll take your comments into consideration when I buy the machine.

One question on the ATi and Nvidia stuff though, I know the Nvidia drivers are proprietary (and works quite well on my two desktop linux computers with Nvidia cards), are the ATi drivers also proprietary, or are they open source?

[Zarel]

ATI has been promising open-source drivers, but I don't know how far they ever got in fulfilling that promise.

[Buginator]

Usually, anything from Nvidia or AMD/ATI will work OK.

The biggest problem is intel / S3/via, since they don't have very good openGL support.
On linux, the binary blobs usually work OK, at least for AMD/ATI & Nvidia from my testing. (Though, I haven't tested on a laptop).


If you plan on playing 'trunk' (aka 2.3), then you would want a fairly good GPU, with around 256-512MB VRAM if possible, or 4GB system RAM if not.
(since I think it can use part of that RAM for VRAM)--heck, I would wait for the new Intel & AMD 'all in one' chips coming sometime in '10, since they should be screamers.

[cybersphinx]

On linux, the binary blobs usually work OK, at least for AMD/ATI & Nvidia from my testing. (Though, I haven't tested on a laptop).

Though as I said, ATIs binary driver might not work with up-to-date kernels.

If you plan on playing 'trunk' (aka 2.3), then you would want a fairly good GPU, with around 256-512MB VRAM if possible, or 4GB system RAM if not.

I did some memory profiling recently, and trunk needed less than 100 MB for textures (which was by far the largest part).

[Buginator]

If you plan on playing 'trunk' (aka 2.3), then you would want a fairly good GPU, with around 256-512MB VRAM if possible, or 4GB system RAM if not.

I did some memory profiling recently, and trunk needed less than 100 MB for textures (which was by far the largest part).

What resolution did you profile at?

[cybersphinx]

What resolution did you profile at?

Good question. I don't remember, anything between 640x480 and 1600x1200. And I don't think the frame buffer was included in that.

But even if you take 1920x1200 doublebuffered, you have ~18 MB for the framebuffer, and say double that for some other buffers, then you are still way below 256 MB.

[fisk0]

Well, I think I need an laptop before 2010 for non-gaming purposes (I'm about to take an university course in C programming soon, and thought it might be useful to have a laptop for that), and since I can't afford the top of the line stuff (or anything close to it) I looked for the cheapest laptops that could do what I think I'll need them to do, and hopefully being able to handle some of the (mostly rather old) games I like to entertain myself with at times.
Well, I have booked an Compaq 615 at 2.1 ghz with 3GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and the ATi Radeon HD3200 integrated video card at an local computer warehouse and is currently hoping I'm not doing the most expensive mistake of my life so far.