F2bnp wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

Deus Ex was an Unreal Tournament engine game, and all of the Unreal games had support for at least one graphics API other than Glide (D3D and/or OpenGL) as well as software rendering that could be used in a pinch.

My (not necessarily accurate) recollection is that only Unreal 1 started out specifically targeting Glide (as far as the Unreal engines), and then Epic realized that was a bad idea and hired someone to write a (OpenGL?) renderer for them. That company dropped the ball, and Epic ended up making a Direct3D renderer in-house. This was brand new when I got my PII-450 with a TNT1 (Diamond Viper V550), so it had some issues for a few months.

Yes, Deus Ex did offer support for most APIs, however if you were really serious about playing it you went with Glide. Voodoo 5 can play this game mostly without a hitch, where as GeForce 2,3 and even 4 have major speed hiccups. The newer renderers for UE1 are truly a godsend!

It was quite playable on my Geforce2MX, but I think my roommate did get a smoother framerate on his 3dfx card.

Morrowind was the first game that was really a travesty on my Geforce2MX.

I agree that the new renderers are great. Some of them have been around for over 10 years now.

HunterZ wrote:

Morrowind was the first game that was really a travesty on my Geforce2MX.

Morrowind is stupid CPU dependent. You want a top end Northwood or Athlon64 for the game. A Geforce 2 MX is also pretty gimpy though.

Actually you shoulda seen Daikatana's 1600x1200 framerate >=double when I went from a Geforce 2 Ti to a plain Geforce 3 a few months ago. Such an amazing improvement in efficiency there. The GF2Ti even has a 50MHz core clock advantage. I don't really like GF256/GF2 cards. They are extremely wasteful of fillrate and bandwidth.

swaaye wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

Morrowind was the first game that was really a travesty on my Geforce2MX.

Morrowind is stupid CPU dependent. You want a top end Northwood or Athlon64 for the game. A Geforce 2 MX is also pretty gimpy though.

Actually you shoulda seen Daikatana's 1600x1200 framerate >=double when I went from a Geforce 2 Ti to a plain Geforce 3 a few months ago. Such an amazing improvement in efficiency there. The GF2Ti even has a 50MHz core clock advantage. I don't really like GF256/GF2 cards. They are extremely wasteful of fillrate and bandwidth.

Nothing is overkill for Morrowind 😁 It can make C2D struggle if you maximize visible and AI range.

RacoonRider wrote:

Nothing is overkill for Morrowind 😁 It can make C2D struggle if you maximize visible and AI range.

Modded, I've seen it bringing my Sandy Bridge i7 down to its knees...

I've actually been playing Morrowind Graphics Overhaul a bit on my overclocked Core i7-860 (Lynnfield) with factory-overclocked Radeon HD5870. Seems to hold 60FPS (vsync enabled) most of the time on highest settings.

Runs like total crap on my Dell M1730 laptop w/Core 2 Duo and GeForce 8700M GT though at pretty much any settings, which is a bummer because I'd really prefer to play it on that rig. Steam in-home streaming is almost good enough, but not quite worth the trouble.

HunterZ wrote:

Runs like total crap on my Dell M1730 laptop w/Core 2 Duo and GeForce 8700M GT though at pretty much any settings, which is a bummer because I'd really prefer to play it on that rig. Steam in-home streaming is almost good enough, but not quite worth the trouble.

I'm guessing MGO has lots of shader effects dragging things down on that little GPU.

One of my friends has a M1730 with SLI 9800M GT boards. You should do that. 😁 Though I really don't know how well that setup works. I'm not much of an SLI/CF fan.

The 9800M boards were still selling for over $500 on eBay last year, but it looks like they've finally dropped to around $200. I should still probably just aim for a new laptop at this point though.

HunterZ wrote:

The 9800M boards were still selling for over $500 on eBay last year, but it looks like they've finally dropped to around $200. I should still probably just aim for a new laptop at this point though.

Yeah that's ridiculous. Time to move on if you want more speed.

The problem is I can't afford a new gaming laptop right now. I'll probably just run my M1730 into the ground playing older and indie games.