Lots of Shared Memory Questions

[John Phoenix]

Well thanks guys.. those in depth explanations helped.

TheLaughingMan said, "My suggestion, let your system has as much of its RAM as possible because those same games you are trying to play will eat regular system RAM space as well. Playing Crysis on Vista or Win7 is easily 2.25 GB of RAM in use. Yeah, you got some breathing room, but toss in a download or two in the background, some music playing while you kill everyone, and your system will starve fast if your GPU is holding 1GB+ to itself.

Also note that your total memory for the GPU is 128 + shared. So if you want it to have 1024 MB total, you want to shard 896 MB."

I will just have to trust that my Bios is already set to do this as I cannot access these settings in the Bios. Wish I could check that but HP has a scaled down bios.

BTW, Are you the same TheLaughingMan who put out mods for Uplink years ago?

Well knowing what I know now I might have looked around more before buying this rig, but I have about 25 FPS games I play smoothly on it from 2000 up to 2008 so I'm not unhappy with it.. a few 2009 games too. Very few on low settings.

 

[John Phoenix]

One last thing guys.. ( I know Mussels would know this and he lurks late at night hehe)

Would you say in general an ATI 4200 HP IGP chip is as good, equal to or better than an ATI 2600 HD PCIe card model - graphics processor wise - would you say it's a stronger GPU because the number is higher?

I had a 2600 HD and I know what it can play. This info may help me determine what games to try in this machine.. but I don't know if the numbering system of the GPU's are the same for desktop cards vs IGP's or how that works exactly..

 

[Yukikaze]

One last thing guys.. ( I know Mussels would know this and he lurks late at night hehe)

Would you say in general an ATI 4200 HP IGP chip is as good, equal to or better than an ATI 2600 HD PCIe card model - graphics processor wise - would you say it's a stronger GPU because the number is higher?

I had a 2600 HD and I know what it can play. This info may help me determine what games to try in this machine.. but I don't know if the numbering system of the GPU's are the same for desktop cards vs IGP's or how that works exactly..

The discrete HD2600 is a good deal more powerful than the HD4200, it has three times the processing units just for starters.

 

[Thrackan]

My 4200 IGP has serious problems running Race Driver GRID. It's great for video, but that's basically all.

 

[John Phoenix]

Oh.. I got you.. cant go by the numbers..the pcie's and igp's are totally different in that respect.

Thanks Yukikaze.

Thrackan, Yeah that game may not play well - I haven't tried any race games yet.. but I got Two Worlds running on it tonight which is pretty graphics heavy. I'm testing tons of games. It seems most games with good graphics from 2008 and below can run on it well enough.

When im done, i'd like to post my entire list of games to give folks an idea that they can do with their cheap laptops.

 

[Thrackan]

Oh.. I got you.. cant go by the numbers..the pcie's and igp's are totally different in that respect.

Thanks Yukikaze.

Thrackan, Yeah that game may not play well - I haven't tried any race games yet.. but I got Two Worlds running on it tonight which is pretty graphics heavy. I'm testing tons of games. It seems most games with good graphics from 2008 and below can run on it well enough.

When im done, i'd like to post my entire list of games to give folks an idea that they can do with their cheap laptops.

Well first off: the 4200 is actually 3XXX based iirc. Crossfiring them is only possible with a very select number of cards, check the hybrid crossfire chart here.

Also, the last 3 numbers usually discern whether the card is low- mid- or high-end. The 4200, on default settings and max (512MB) shared memory, does about as well as the 3450 I used to have a couple of years back. Which roughly translates to horrible in-game performance.

Raising the IGP clock can bring half-decent performance (read: good frames in WoW), but this thing is clearly not made for gaming.

 

[Mussels]

One last thing guys.. ( I know Mussels would know this and he lurks late at night hehe)

Would you say in general an ATI 4200 HP IGP chip is as good, equal to or better than an ATI 2600 HD PCIe card model - graphics processor wise - would you say it's a stronger GPU because the number is higher?

I had a 2600 HD and I know what it can play. This info may help me determine what games to try in this machine.. but I don't know if the numbering system of the GPU's are the same for desktop cards vs IGP's or how that works exactly..

you stalkin me?

and yeah as said, 2600 is faster than 4200.

go by the second number more than the first number - 2600 vs 4200

4 series cards are gunna have newer tech and more features, but the lowest of the low 4K card aint gunna be faster than a midrange 2K or 3K card

 

[John Phoenix]

Raising the IGP clock can bring half-decent performance (read: good frames in WoW), but this thing is clearly not made for gaming.

No can do. This laptop is still in warranty. I understand these are much harder to OC anyway.

I don't play any multiplayer games on it, but I hear those are a lot tougher on frame rate/performance than single player games.

Thanks Thrackan and Mussels.

 

[Thrackan]

No can do. This laptop is still in warranty. I understand these are much harder to OC anyway.

I don't play any multiplayer games on it, but I hear those are a lot tougher on frame rate/performance than single player games.

Thanks Thrackan and Mussels.

Multiplayer being tougher on framerate is not a GPU issue, as the same graphics apply for both single and multiplayer. It is usually a CPU/memory issue, as the data that gets sent and received (with an onboard network card, thus using CPU) needs to be processed (using CPU/memory) to show you the other players and stuff.

Either way, I have an onboard 4200 in a desktop PC, not in a laptop. That's why I was talking about crossfire and stuff And overclocking, of course, is a choice.