64mb ATI Radeon 9100 Express VGA

[wikitoy]

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mga bai, im planning to buy a laptop with this video card 64mb ati radeon 9100 express vga. Ang ram niya kay 256mb, ingon ang technician nako nga if i'll upgrade to 512mb kay automatic daw mo 128mb ang video card. Is this true? With this if i upgrade to 512mb maka play na ba ang laptop ug doom3 or any other games nga medyo dako dako ug memory ang kinahanglanon?

[yob]

brad, ang Radeon 9100 is capable of addressing up to 128MB shared memory. however, the BIOS of the Laptop would limit the shared memory depending on the RAM installed... this would not be a problem if you have 512mb memory

with regards to playing newer games, this GPU just cant cut it.
common misconception is that the more of graphics memory, the more performance, this is just not true

As long as the game textures can be stored at the graphics memory, it is left to the pipelines and the memory speed that will determine the performace. Graphics memory requirement increases when the game resolution increases, since textures will be larger

for example Quake 3, the textures of this games will fit nicely on just 4MB of Graphics memory at 640x480x16 resolution,
when we crank the resolution to 1600x1200x32, maybe we need a 16MB of graphics memory to store the textures, otherwise the game would perform poorly due to texture swapping
however, having a 256MB Graphics memory will just have a similar performance in such case

another factor is the generation of the GPU, newer games use the latest effects such as pixel shaders, HDR, antialiasing, etc...
older cards may have an early implementation but are not optimized for performance to such new effects

Radeon 9100, by the way, is designed optimized for OpenGL 1.4 and DirectX 8.1,and only have 2 pipelines (take note Radeon 1900XTX has 48 pixel pipelines)

and games now uses either OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 9
DirectX 10 is just on the horizon

by the way, DOOM3 it requires at least a Radeon 9800 or a GeForce 6200 (128-bit memory part) to achieve a acceptable framerates, at least 128MB memory

both of these cards are OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 9 capable, however the Geforce 6200 is more optimized since its newer

[spookey]

bro, i think yob covers almost everything you need to know. in addition to his advise, there are laptops that has an upgradable video card. so if the laptop that your referring to has this option and you really want to play heavy games then maybe you could upgrade the video card. you may purchase a Dell for example because they have laptops that you can upgrade the video card. They even have an SLI laptop. Anyways that would be your choice. do note they are also quite expensive.

[wikitoy]

thanks a lot mga bro, it helps.....