I have a few older Win98 era laptops that do some 3D acceleration.

I have a older Dell Latitude with P3 1GHZ and Radeon Mobility that does ok.

I also have a Gateway with a Celeron 700MHZ, and a Savage IX/MX of some kind. I think it's basically a Savage4 of some kind.

I also have a Compaq with a Athlon4 and a even crappier Savage Twister K, it's almost useless.

They do ok, not groundbreaking FPS but enough to play some HalfLife, Quake2, Unreal/UT99.

My old laptop (signature) has a Radeon 7000. No idea how it performs, though, seeing as I don't really play games at all...

i had a compaq with some old celeron and a rage with 4mb ram - did both decently

ATI Rage Pro was the first real deal I believe. It had a variety of notebook model names like Mobility C, EC, L, M, M1, P along with Rage etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060427060938/ww … hosein/rpro.htm

I had a Compaq Presario 1670 with an AMD K6-2 and the ATI Rage LT Pro 8MB. It supports DX5 and OpenGL 1.1. I played some early Windows 98 3D games on it. It also had the ability to properly scale lower resolutions to full screen on the LCD panel, which most laptops of the era couldn't do. So you can game at 640x480 on a 1024x768 panel without it looking terrible or having black borders. Th Mobility Rage M1 and Mobility Rage 128 (M3/M4) were pretty common in earlier Pentium III based laptops.

There's also those early Trident Cyberblade 3D laptops which do accelerate both, but are really really bad for OpenGL on the texture caching side of things where it'll be deceleration there mostly unless you use a D3D wrapper for that. Lower-end '99 Presarios tend to have them, and Thinkpads too I think

Yes scaling can be big problem on some of these machines. When it's wrong it looks terrible.

My Thinkpad A20m had working acceleration with an 8MB ATI Rage Mobility M1. I remember getting a 3DMark2000 score with it, maybe around 1000 or so. It also ran Ultima 9 in low settings but it wasn't reliable. I only tested it in the starting area. If I put too much of the world into view, I'd get a crash with some message that sounded to me like it didn't have enough video memory.
I never used it to actually play anything, but it probably would have worked with late 90s games.
I think I ran an OpenGL screensaver on it, and I know I did a little OpenGL programming on it, but not much.

At some point, it's 3D capability was broken in IBM's later drivers, and older drivers were removed from their site. It won't run 3DMark2000 anymore. Don't remember if I tried a real game since then. It was never a gaming machine anyway, but I still found that annoying.

My brother had a slightly later Thinkpad with a 16MB Savage Something, which was superior for 3D, but it's driver sometimes BSODed. I never had that problem with the ATI.

Dell Latitude C600 and C610. The C600 has an ATi Rage Mobility in it and the C610 has an ATI Mobility M6.
Dell Inspiron 5000/5000e has an ATi Rage in it, but can be upgraded to an ATi Rage 128.
Actually... IIRC The Dell Latitude CPi/CPx/CPh and their corresponding Inspiron models all have a Rage Pro/Rage Mobility in them.

I have an IBM ThinkPad R40 has a Radeon Mobility 7500 and 2 Dell Inspiron 600m laptops that have the Mobility 9000, and they do pretty good as well.

misterjones wrote:

Actually... IIRC The Dell Latitude CPi/CPx/CPh and their corresponding Inspiron models all have a Rage Pro/Rage Mobility in them.

Although the Dell Latitude CPx did come with an ATI Rage GPU, the Dell Latitude CPi came with a Neomagic GPU which only does 2D so I wouldn't mention that one.

The Dell Inspiron 8000-8200 (and Latitude C8x0) laptops are pretty interesting because their graphics cards can be swapped with generations spanning from Rage Mobility M4 all the way to Radeon 9000 (along with nVidia Geforce2 Go and 4MX). I suppose this can count because, as I've mentioned, they had ATI Rage as an option even though I know the OP specifically said he was asking about laptops that are older than Geforce2 Go. I haven't checked the performance of the Rage Mobility M4 because I swapped mine out with a spare Geforce2 Go card early on when I bought my Inspiron 8000. I still have the Rage Mobility M4 card which I might put back in at some point to benchmark when I get spare IDE laptop hard drives. 😎

Supposedly, some NEC laptops (particularly the NEC Versa FXi) came with Silicon Motion Lynx3D GPUs, but IDK how their performance is and those laptops are rarer than hen's teeth nowadays. My NEC Versa FX has a LynxEM GPU which IIRC has no 3D capabilities due to being a business oriented sub-notebook where gaming wasn't a priority.

My old Latitude has the Radeon Mobility.
I can't remember the exact model of the machine, but it is the Radeon Mobility 7500 16MB version I think.
It works pretty well for the range of older games that I like to play.
I do run Windows 98se on it though, XP is a bit pointless for this era machine for gaming IMHO. it will work fine for day to day usage though, it's 1GHZ and 512MB RAM.

I do have a Sony Vaio with a Pentium M and a Radeon Mobility 9700, that one will about anything.

shamino wrote:

My brother had a slightly later Thinkpad with a 16MB Savage Something, which was superior for 3D, but it's driver sometimes BSODed. I never had that problem with the ATI.

That would be the Thinkpad T23. It was the only Thinkpad model with a Tualatin Pentium III and 16 MB S3 SuperSavage graphics. I briefly owned one and it had no problem with Quake 2.

T20, T21, T22 on the other hand had 8MB S3 Savage graphics and a pre-Tualatin Pentium III.