Any other gamers stuck using the ATI radeon mobility xpress 200m graphics card?

waywardryan

I got my laptop for a steal and it's great except for this one component. The 128/128 memory card drives me nuts. It runs most games pretty damn well for a laptop card but some games, even older ones like KOTOR, won't function past 1 frame per second.

Has anybody had any luck tweaking their's? I have tried third party drivers and such with no luck.

Damn ati!

Ballman

I dodged a bullet on my laptop; I was looking at one with an x300m, and the sales guy steered me away, explaining the numbering convention. (I hadn't bought a video card since early 2002.) Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the x200 and such are the bargain end of the x/m line. Even my x700m has trouble running many pc games.

What model laptop do you have?

Edit: FYI, I found an informative link at notebookreview.com that goes over some of the basics of laptop graphics cards. Linky.

waywardryan

I have an HP amd 64 bit processor. 3800+ (I think... I am still not used to these weird amd numbers) with 2 gigs of ram and a high speed 80 gig hd. Overall its a very nice laptop that can run some very demanding games (F.E.A.R. on medium, HL2 on medium-high settings, rome total war on maxxed out 50 billion units at any given time) but certain games just won't work at all.

OfficeBuddy

waywardryan wrote: »

I got my laptop for a steal and it's great except for this one component. The 128/128 memory card drives me nuts. It runs most games pretty damn well for a laptop card but some games, even older ones like KOTOR, won't function past 1 frame per second.

Has anybody had any luck tweaking their's? I have tried third party drivers and such with no luck.

Damn ati!

My laptop has the same card. Not been able to tweak it much, but then haven't tried much.

That's a pain about KOTOR, it's been on my list of games to try for a while now...

Envy

I used to be stuck with it until I built a computer last June, but it was the first time where I had to compromise frame rate over graphics, and that was somewhat a difficult transition for me.

waywardryan

It is the type of graphics that the game uses. I can't remember what it is called, opengl or directdraw or something. Anyway the card won't support any game that uses the same type of graphics even though you have more than enough power to do so. It is a freakin driver limitation and ATI abandoned the card ages ago for all intensive purposes.

tofu

The x200m supports both OpenGL and Direct3D...

It's an IGP, you really can't expect that much of it. It barely runs Civ4 at an acceptable framerate.

waywardryan

tofu trust me it is a driver issue not a power issue. I don't play civ4 but like I said you would be surprised what you can get it to do with the games that it likes.

Ballman

I can't speak for FEAR, but regarding your performance in Half-Life 2, I've read that the graphics card power doesn't make much difference in comparison to the processor speed, RAM, and video memory. Since you have 2 gigs of RAM, 128 MB of VRAM, and an AMD 3800+, you have more than an adequate system for HL2. For instance, my x700m chugs on HL2 because it's a 64MB card working with a 1440x900 resolution. If I doubled my VRAM, I'd see a significant performance increase.

tofu

waywardryan wrote: »

tofu trust me it is a driver issue not a power issue. I don't play civ4 but like I said you would be surprised what you can get it to do with the games that it likes.

After a little research it looks like KotOR uses OpenGL. ATi's OpenGL support has always been shoddy so it's not surprising an IGP with so little power would struggle with it. There's really nothing you can do about it.

Raslin

I have an Xpress 200

I feel your pain. Every day.

waywardryan

Told ya