nforce4max wrote:

Not bad and wonder how my HP elitebook 2730p that I bought for just $10 stacks up against this, C2D sl9400 with gm45/gs45. Atoms were never fast and unthinkable for gaming except for a few with the Nvidia Ion but pointless when cheap c2d laptops can be had for the price of a chicken.

GM45 vs. BayTrail IGP huh? You should run 3DMark03 and 3DMark05. I think GM45 will lose but I'm not sure.

But frankly the point of the thread is about playing old PC games in the palm of your hand with a device that is incredibly portable.

I wonder how Engoo runs on one of those (one of the more recent 270+ revisions). That's a real CPU choker and it seems to favor Intel despite being mostly C.....

nforce4max wrote:

Not bad and wonder how my HP elitebook 2730p that I bought for just $10 stacks up against this, C2D sl9400 with gm45/gs45. Atoms were never fast and unthinkable for gaming except for a few with the Nvidia Ion but pointless when cheap c2d laptops can be had for the price of a chicken.

Just $10 for that sort of Tablet PC? If it's in fully-working order, that's a steal!

I'm about to prepare my own 2730p for a new owner, though. Recently stepped up to a Fujitsu T901 because that 2730p was showing its age, especially for anything GPU-limited.

swaaye wrote:

GM45 vs. BayTrail IGP huh? You should run 3DMark03 and 3DMark05. I think GM45 will lose but I'm not sure.

But frankly the point of the thread is about playing old PC games in the palm of your hand with a device that is incredibly portable.

The GMA 4500MHD is just plain terrible in my experience. He might be able to get away with some Unreal Tournament, but not much past that. I think it's quite telling that Tom's Hardware compared it to a GeForce 3 on a VGA chart somewhere, which is not what a Core 2 Duo of any sort deserves.

The GMA HD 3000 in Sandy Bridge CPUs has already proven to be much improved, albeit still not enough for most modern games. It's barely enough for Pinball Arcade, Hammerwatch still needs its shaders turned off, Minecraft somehow went from "unplayable" to "surprisingly playable, but not completely smooth", IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 actually runs kinda decently...

I'm actually wondering if the Bay Trail IGP can still do better than that. I'd hope so, anyway...the vast majority of Tablet PCs are GPU-limited pretty hard, even the ones they cram full-voltage Core i7s into.

And as for old PC gaming on Tablet PCs, frankly I wouldn't even consider it without a keyboard and mouse for obvious interface-related reasons. All my 2730p and T901 gaming is done in laptop mode, with the possible exception of those old point-and-click adventures. I think I'd feel downright cramped on a Venue 8 Pro due to the much smaller screen and lack of integrated keyboard.

If you can make it work, though, more power to you!

You'd be surprised how well some games work with touch. If they are primarily mouse based and left click oriented, all is usually well. I wrote about some already. I just yesterday tried Legend of Grimrock to great success.

Also, see the first post for an idea of Baytrail GPU performance. I think it seems to line up fairly well with a Radeon 9700. Pretty sweet for a tablet! Intel's drivers are working well these days too.

If right-clicking and cursor hover input are a barrier, then you have the option to buy this Synaptics pen, from what I understand about the Venue 8 Pro's active digitizer implementation. I just wish it was included in the box and the out-of-the-box experience wasn't lackluster according to early reviews, but Dell has promised firmware updates to fix that right up.

I'm still not sure I trust non-Wacom active pen digitizers yet, but if Synaptics plays their cards right, they could leapfrog N-trig and be the biggest threat Wacom's seen yet in the Tablet PC space.

I don't have a Radeon 9700 on hand for performance comparisons, though...just a Radeon 9600 XT and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB, along with an Athlon XP 1800+ box for the former and the latter potentially being matched with an Athlon XP 3200+ system, if I didn't opt to replace it with a locally-sourced GeForce FX 5950 Ultra per your recommendation for DX8 and prior titles.

nforce4max wrote:

Not bad and wonder how my HP elitebook 2730p that I bought for just $10 stacks up against this, C2D sl9400 with gm45/gs45. Atoms were never fast and unthinkable for gaming except for a few with the Nvidia Ion but pointless when cheap c2d laptops can be had for the price of a chicken.

How the crap did you get a C2D laptop for $10? I seriously want to know. xD

On a related note, I've been looking for another laptop of some sort, since my Alienware isn't very portable (but performs reasonably well), and my Acer is getting to be a bit old for day to day use. I want to find something that's reasonably portable, but also capable of doing some light gaming (mainly emulators and late 90s/early 2000s games, but possibly also TF2). My best case scenario would almost be an ultrabook, except I can't see myself affording one of those anytime soon.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I don't have a Radeon 9700 on hand for performance comparisons, though...just a Radeon 9600 XT and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB, along with an Athlon XP 1800+ box for the former and the latter potentially being matched with an Athlon XP 3200+ system, if I didn't opt to replace it with a locally-sourced GeForce FX 5950 Ultra per your recommendation for DX8 and prior titles.

It is complicated. Baytrail does relatively better when the unified shader design gets utilized well and shows the weaknesses of the old chips. But in simple DirectX 7 games it seems fillrate limited and maybe equal to a 9600 Pro. The modern ALU hardware is pretty useless in those games.

Compared to a 5900 Ultra things are probably entertaining. 5900 is pretty nice for up to D3D8 but Baytrail would just demolish it with D3D9 and do it using only a couple of watts 🤣. Baytrail seems competitive with 6600 GT in more advanced games. NV40 and G70 are pretty weak at SM3 and I think Baytrail could beat the high end versions in some scenarios.

swaaye wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

this only further proves how good of a CPU the Athlon XP is and how usable it can still be.

Actually I think it shows how vastly far we have come when a SOC on a <5W max budget has a quad core CPU and a GPU that can rival a ~70W Athlon XP with a ~60W GPU!

true. i think the Intel HD graphics are the reason for the lower FPS. I got a free C2D laptop with an SSD 🤣

can you test 3dmark 2001SE?

Bay Trail IGP is a little slow compared to what Intel currently have for the bigger chips, even the HD Graphics (HD 2500) from the ivy bridge Celerons is much faster, but I think it's clearly better than the old GMA 4500.

CPU is pretty ok, if you go with a single core only I think it's pretty competent against a high end CPUs from 2003-2004, and if you consider it have not one but 4 cores it's in a different league for software that can use that.

anyway, for gaming I would think the AMD Kabini stuff is more interesting, unfortunately it's hard to find them in any good device.

Here is 3DMark01SE

unfortunately the results I had were using XP for 2001se, I know 2006 is faster on XP compared to Vista+, but that's basically the same performance as a Radeon 8500LE with some Athlon XP 2000+ for the game test, fill rate, but much higher (for Bay trail) on pixel/vertex shader and bump mapping test.

but interesting stuff, thanks for testing.

It does seem like a Radeon 8500 or 9600 in say DirectX 7 level games like Unreal 2. On the other hand if you run something with more complex D3D 8/9 effects, it pulls ahead of those quite a bit, which is what the shader results are showing. Deux Ex Invisible War runs well, and that was a very demanding game on 8500 and 9600. It runs Defense Grid and Legend of Grimrock well too even at native 1280x800. I think this is amazing for a passively cooled device.

But I don't really play anything on it. Heh. It's just too annoying to deal with the touch control. It is by far the fastest tablet I've used though and is like web browsing on a desktop. Really excellent.