The GeForce Is Strong In This One: GeForce Go 6150 for the Budget Gamer

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INTRODUCTION

Integrated Graphics Parts (hereafter referred to as IGP) are often the source of much scorn and derision in the gaming forums of this site, and not entirely without merit. IGPs are at best cut-down versions of discrete parts that have been more or less shoved onto the northbridge of the motherboard chipset. At worst, they start with &quot;Intel.&quot; (Seriously, Intel. Hardware Texture and Lighting is the feature that practically established graphics as we know them today. Let's get with the program.) The flipside to IGPs is that they consume minimal power and substantially reduce the cost of a computer. They're also one less source of heat. In a notebook, these are very enticing upsides, especially when gamers make up such a minor part of the demographic.

There could be any number of reasons why you'll find yourself with a notebook with an IGP. Budget can be a huge part of it. Portability can be another factor; thin and lights and ultraportables tend not to have room to accommodate a discrete graphics part and the heat it generates. You may even wind up with it if, like me, a particularly good-looking laptop is at your local Best Buy, and you can't get it with dedicated graphics.

AMD notebooks tend to be good budget alternatives; just because Intel's hardware is faster clock-for-clock than AMD's right now doesn't make AMD's worse, and the frugal consumer can pick up a unit with a dual-core 64-bit processor in it on the cheap if they shop for AMD. Intel's Core 2 Duos fetch a premium in the market, and cheaper notebooks tend to use cut down Core Duos or the new Pentium Dual-Core. The really nice thing about buying AMD, though, is that you aren't bound to Intel's Centrino platform, and that means you aren't bound to Intel's miserable GMA 950 graphics part.

This brings us to the GeForce Go 6150, which is as of this article the best IGP you can buy in the notebook market. Note that the alternative, the Radeon Xpress line, is pretty potent on its own. I do have to give the crown to nVidia's part, though, and this review will talk about why.

GAMING ON AN IGP? REALLY?

The casual gamer honestly does not care that much about what resolution the game runs at, just as long as they can play it and enjoy it. The reality is that a small portion of the population knows what the hell Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering even are, they just want to know if the game'll run or not.

Much to the chagrin of many forum members, I am pleased to report that the Go 6150 can in fact game...and in some instances, fairly capably. If you're a light gamer, or if you have a gaming machine at home but might want to pop a shooter in every once in a while on the road, a strong IGP can definitely fit the bill.

The GeForce Go 6150 will run all but the most demanding games at low to medium settings. Now admittedly, in my unit, the Go 6150 is operating on what basically amounts to a &quot;best case scenario,&quot; but your mileage won't vary too much. In the case of Doom 3, for example, I achieved very similar results on my father's desktop Go 6150 which was running on a single core processor and only a quarter of the RAM my notebook is using.

Here's the test system:

• HP Pavilion dv6258se Special Edition (purchased from BestBuy)
• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (1.8 GHz, 2x 512k L2 Cache)
• 2GB DDR2-667 RAM (advertised at DDR2-533, so take note frugal shoppers)
• nVidia GeForce Go 6150
• 120GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 Hard Disk
• 1280x800 WXGA Glossy Screen
• Windows XP Professional SP2 with Dual Core Hotfix

The GeForce Go 6150 settings used are as follows:

• ForceWare 84.66 (modded for mobile use from www.LaptopVideo2Go.com)
• Video RAM set to 128MB in BIOS; TurboCache brings it up to 512MB in Windows
• Slider set to Performance
• Display scaling set to Fixed Aspect Ratio *

* This feature alone is what makes nVidia hardware so desirable in notebooks against ATI's. The majority of notebooks on sale are widescreens; this feature allows you to put black bars on the sides of the image while scaling it to fill the top and bottom of the screen, maintaining the aspect ratio of the game. ATI hardware doesn't have this feature, and will only let you stretch the game to fill the entire screen, or run it surrounded with black in its native resolution, taking up a fraction of the screen. I cannot stress enough how useful I've found this. I personally won't buy a notebook that isn't using nVidia hardware because of it, and I run nVidia in my desktop for my widescreen.

For each game, I'll list the settings I found playable. It's worth mentioning that I tend to be very strict about my definition of &quot;playable.&quot; Choppiness needs to be minimal; the game should be spending the vast majority of its time above 25 fps. Shooter fans know how critical a solid framerate can be.

ANATOMY OF THE GEFORCE GO 6150

The nVidia GeForce Go 6150 is basically a desktop GeForce 6150SE that can clock down for battery life. But what is that?

This is mainly for the techies, but the jargon-light should still be able to pick out details. The Go 6150's specifications are as follows:

• 425 MHz Core Clock
• TurboCache Unified Memory Architecture
• Shader Model 3.0 Support
• 2 Pixel Pipelines with 1 Texture Unit Each
• 2 Pixel Shaders
• 1 Vertex Shader

Now, the Go 6150 is running off of system memory, and system memory is SLOW. The memory on dedicated video cards tends to run at much higher speeds than system memory does, and at tighter timings to allow for better interaction with the graphics processor. This means the Go 6150 is at a disadvantage for memory access speed.

The flipside of this is that the Go 6150 has access to just about all the memory it wants, so texture size isn't really an issue.

The Go 6150 also has the benefit of having some fairly modern technology and a fairly efficient core design. Solid, efficient design helps make up for some shortcomings, but more than that, can also get you shader power at a discount.

The major weaknesses I experienced with the Go 6150 were in lighting and shadow effects, and in running at high resolutions. 800x600 seemed to really be the cap for it; anything higher turned into a slideshow regardless of the generation of game. When Unreal Tournament 2004 has to run at roughly the same settings as Doom 3, it's pretty safe to assume there's a just plain hard limit to what the part can produce.

DOOM 3

I went ahead and started with the big dog. This is the game that makes or breaks an IGP in my opinion, and it's the one ATI's IGPs can't handle (at least, the ones without dedicated memory).

nVidia's traditional lead in OpenGL games manifests here.

The playable settings I found in Doom 3 were:

• 800x600
• Low Quality
• No Shadows, VSync, or AA; everything else on.

And it looked something like this:

800x600 Low Quality is very playable as long as shadows are disabled. (view large image)

Running Doom 3's built in timedemo (using the second run as the first run is always lower due to the game loading textures into memory) on these settings netted 22.1 fps, but for what it's worth I found the gameplay to be fairly smooth.

Unfortunately, the big performance killer was enabling shadows. While disabling shadows does feel a bit like gutting Doom 3, get a good look at it when it's running without bump mapping and tell me which feature you'd rather have. The lightmap shadows in Doom 3 aren't as good as the dynamic shadows the game is capable of, but the mood isn't totally lost.

Adjusting high quality special effects or specular lighting yielded virtually no performance bonuses. Disabling the special effects did smooth out the game a little bit in combat, but outside of that the impact was neglibile. Removing specular lighting just made the game look vastly less interesting, probably more damaging than disabling shadows.

An alternative for those aching to score a couple more frames is dropping the resolution to 640x480 and going up to High Quality, where I was able to benchmark up to 27.3 fps. Here, too, the gameplay was actually quite smooth and the game as a whole was very playable.

For those curious, I also ran it at 640x480 Low Quality. The benchmark results of the playable settings listed below:

• 800x600 LQ -- 22.1 fps
• 640x480 HQ -- 27.3 fps
• 640x480 LQ -- 31.0 fps

I want to stress that even at the lowest settings with no shadows, Doom 3 is still miles from being an eyesore. Those really aching for fps should turn off bump mapping, but be warned, doing that really guts the look of the game, and it honestly isn't necessary.

Obviously this isn't ideal, but for an IGP? Being able to bump the game up one resolution is pretty outstanding.

F.E.A.R.

If you can't tell by now, I've been pretty keen to try and push the Go 6150 as hard as I can. I've heard reports of F.E.A.R. running on peoples' Radeon Xpress IGPs, so I figured...why not? And I gave F.E.A.R. a go. Like Doom 3, I was impressed.

Again, as I mentioned before, the Go 6150 hates lighting and shadow effects, so Volumetric Lighting and Shadows were disabled. These were the settings I ran F.E.A.R. at:

• 640x480
• COMPUTER OPTIONS:
  • Single Player Physics Medium
  • Multiplayer Physics Medium
  • Max Software Sounds Medium
  • Particle Bouncing Medium
  • Shell Casings Off
  • World Detail Minimum
  • Corpse Detail Minimum
• VIDEO CARD OPTIONS: EFFECTS
  • Effects Detail Medium
  • Model Decals Medium
  • Water Resolution Medium
  • Reflections &amp; Displays Medium
  • Volumetric Lights Off
• GRAPHICS
  • FSAA Off
  • Light Detail Minimum
  • Shadows Off
  • Texture Filtering Trilinear
  • Texture Resolution Medium
  • Videos Medium
  • Pixel Doubling Off
  • DX8 Shaders Off
  • Shaders Maximum

With these settings, I benchmarked:

• Minimum FPS: 18
• Average FPS: 28
• Maximum FPS: 57
• 31% of gameplay below 25 FPS
• 66% of gameplay between 25 and 40 FPS
• 3% of gameplay above 40 FPS

Ideal? No, but still very solid and very playable. F.E.A.R. is an extremely tweakable game, too, so I'd welcome any suggestions from people in the forums on what they run F.E.A.R. at on their Go 6150s. The game is also playable at 800x600 if you reduce most of the settings, but I felt these offered the best image quality. Your mileage may vary.

And just in case you were wondering what F.E.A.R. looked like at these settings:

640x480, but with pretty decent detail; the resolution is minimal but the settings are not. (view large image)

Disabling the shadows in F.E.A.R. does hurt, just like it did in Doom 3, but the game is still pretty attractive and plenty playable. Remember: the Go 6150 isn't a gaming part, so getting performance like this out of it is impressive. Try getting it from a GMA 950.

I do want to make an odd point about F.E.A.R. though: don't play the demo. Performance in the demo is roughly half what the retail game runs at. I don't understand why they released such an awful demo, but it was what turned me off of the game for a while.

GUILD WARS

I picked up Guild Wars: Factions recently as my gateway into the Guild Wars world. While it's my understanding that Nightfall is a bit more demanding, these numbers should be representative of Guild Wars: Factions and the original Guild Wars. For what it's worth, I doubt Nightfall would require too much of a drop in detail.

I ran Guild Wars: Factions with the following settings:

• 800x600
• Terrain Quality Medium
• Reflections Terrain and Sky
• Texture Quality High
• Shadows Medium
• Shader Quality High
• Post-Processing Effects

At these settings my framerate floated mainly between 25 and 35 fps. If you'd like to know how it looked, check this out:

800x600 with med-high details is not too shabby. The post-processing effect really improves the look of the game. (view large image)

This is another one of those oddballs where raising the shader setting improves performance instead of reducing it. I'd expect World of Warcraft to run at fairly similar settings if not even a little bit better. I'd test it, but I cancelled my account some time ago and kicked the habit.

As for how the game itself is, I'll let you know. It's definitely a nice change of pace from the high fantasy art style of World of Warcraft, opting to go for a more realistic art design while avoiding looking ugly like Oblivion, which honestly only really looks good if you turn the shaders up.

FAR CRY

Far Cry is a favorite of mine and in my opinion one of the best - if not THE best - shooters ever made, though most will agree it jumps the shark about 2/3 of the way through.

Intel swears up and down their GMA 950 will run Far Cry, which is a crock and a half. The Go 6150, on the other hand, acquits itself admirably. I game with these settings:

• 800x600
• Machine Spec Very High
• Texture Quality Medium
• Texture Filter Quality Trilinear
• Anisotropic Filtering 1x
• Particle Count Medium
• Special Effects Quality Medium
• Environment Quality Medium
• Shadow Quality Low
• Water Quality Ultra High
• Lighting Quality Low

Obviously this isn't as gorgeous as Far Cry CAN look, but it's mighty good all things considered. I don't have benchmark results for it, but it's definitely very playable, as this screenshot attests:

Far Cry at 800x600 and medium detail isn't ideal, but when you consider the fact that it's running that well on integrated graphics, you can at least appreciate how far graphic hardware has come. (view large image)

I did set the water to Ultra High, but that's because Far Cry has gorgeous water, and as you can see, it wasn't a huge deal.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004

Another classic, Unreal Tournament 2004 is one of the less demanding games on the market. Now three years old, it's still a good-looking and popular game.

Unfortunately, driver support for it hasn't aged well, at least on nVidia's side. Performance hasn't scaled well on new hardware, and the Go 6150 turns in a less than ideal performance.

Played with these settings, though, UT2004 is very playable:

• 800x600
• All details set to Normal
• All switches enabled
• Fog Distance set to maximum

It's still a fun and attractive game:

Unreal Tournament 2004 at 800x600 isn't ideal, but isn't this what most of us were playing it at when it was released? (view large image)

The important thing to note is that the Go 6150's performance is on par with the Radeon Xpress line, but also that it completely eclipses the GMA 950, which can't even run it steadily, no matter how high or low you set it at.

OBLIVION

Ah. Oblivion, or as I like to call it, &quot;Shader Hell.&quot; Finally a game that brings the mighty(?) Go 6150 to its knees. Indoors I earned a robust framerate averaging about lucky 13 even with everything turned all the way down.

Trying to figure out why what amounts to colored snot murders performance like it does. (view large image)

Yeah, not happening. I can only imagine what outdoor performance would be like, probably pushing a screaming 7 frames per second.

But I refuse to be beaten! Many of you have probably heard of Oldblivion (www.oldblivion.com), which modifies Oblivion to run on older hardware by running pre-2.0 shaders. Let's see if that helps any.

Oldblivion: Well...it's playable. (view large image)

Using the Oldblivion mod makes Oblivion playable on the Go 6150, but to do so, you'll need to set run the mod's Config and set it to Medium, then reduce all of the settings in the game to pretty much their minimum. Then you'll average 22 fps looking like the screenshot (the 17 was an odd dip).

Of course, you can set Oldblivion to Low quality...

Yay! Low Quality! (view large image)

But then it just looks like washed out crap. Playable washed out crap, but still...washed out crap.

I don't know what to tell you, kids. If you really want it to, Oblivion can run on the Go 6150, but I wouldn't recommend it. Still, this exists as proof of concept. If you want Oblivion on the Go 6150, you can have it.

A BRIEF DISSERTATION ON CHANGING THE VIDEO RAM SETTING

On my father's GeForce 6150 desktop, I experienced no performance difference at all changing the amount of allocated RAM in BIOS.

I elected to benchmark using Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 to determine if changing the video memory allocated resulted in any changes in performance.

The Doom 3 demo was run at 640x480 High Quality, Shadows disabled.

UMark ran Unreal Tournament 2004 at the settings listed above, using the map DM-Curse4 and eight bots.

	32MB	64MB	128MB
Doom 3	27.5 fps	27.6 fps	27.3 fps
UT 2004	42.9 fps	41.7 fps	45.9 fps

Well, I know I'm certainly impressed by what dedicating 128MB to the Go 6150 gets you. I mean, look at that huge performance delta.

I'd suspect this setting would be more relevant on machines with lower RAM, but my father's 6150 was only equipped with two 256MB sticks and it didn't matter there either.

I think a lot of this has to do with nVidia's TurboCache technology, which I suspect just doesn't care what you assign to the part and pretty much will take what it needs anyhow.

Still, this is food for thought.

CONCLUSION

It took a 7950GT and a 21&quot; widescreen to get me to play Oblivion. Maybe the rest of you aren't as picky.

When I bought my notebook, my shiny HP dv6258se Special Edition (with the white imprint finish and gorgeous silver keys), I was concerned about the Go 6150. My custom dv6000t with the Go 7400 got delayed and wasn't arriving until after my coverage of the Game Developers Conference, and frankly, this laptop was hard to resist when I saw it in the store. Having enjoyed a honeymoon period with this gorgeous notebook, I'll be sending the dv6000t back.

Look, I game on my desktop. I just want my notebook to game once in a great while. But beyond that...the Go 7400 is designed to game, however middling the quality. The Go 6150 has to fight tooth and nail to do what it does. Call me sentimental, but I'm partial to it. It's fun to try and squeeze performance out of grossly limited hardware. I'm probably insane.

With all that said, the Go 6150 is a solid choice for the very casual gamer. It'll run the games on the market and playably, so when you're on business trips or killing time between classes, it's pretty reliable. It's not going to win any contests, and it's pretty much capped at 800x600 for gaming performance, but it's reliable.

And to think...if I hadn't gone for this totally sweet looking notebook, I might never have realized what the Go 6150 could do if you whip it hard enough.

 

Notebooks under $1,000 that have the NVidia Go 6150 Card

• HP Pavilion dv2000z (starting at $799)
• HP Pavilion dv6000z (starting at $669)
• Compaq Presario v3000z (starting at $699)
• Compaq Presario v6000z (starting at $629)
• HP tx1000z tablet pc convertible (starting at $1299)

 

Awesome post, Pulp! That's all i can say. I'm very impressed

 

Hey its good to know for those thinking that their graphics card are not capable of playing games that they maybe underestimating it and with a sacrifice or details and resolution you can play it and still enjoy it ...a great post dude

 

You are insane Pulp, but I totally enjoyed reading this report

 

While I agree with u on the fact that the nVidia IGP is better than the ATI ones. I'm surprised at ur Guild Wars result. My card runs it at 1280*800 very smoothly with fps at a constant 25-30.

Maybe GW isn't that demanding, and scaling it up to a higher resolution doesn't affect performance much.

Either way, good review.

 

Excellent work sir!

 

Fantastic. A real eye-opener for people with the integrated graphics chipsets, especially the 6150. I've become so accustomed to playing at native resolution I didn't realise that things can still look good at lower resolutions and graphics levels. Nicely done.

 

Very nice post.

 

I am pleasantly surprised by the performance!

Will now bookmark this thread for future reference to answer questions

 

And... AMD/Ati apparently released the x1250.. and soon x1270. If the 6150 gets those benchmarks, and the x1150 outperforms the 6150.. imagine THAT.

I don't know why but I always enjoy reading your articles, nice post Pulp!

 

Just wanted to point out that ATI does indeed have a similar function to Fixed Aspect Ratio, easily available in CCC under display properties. Otherwise, excellent article.

 

Interesting post.

 

This is the first I've heard about it, please tell us more.

 

wow awesome article.

 

I don't know how long this option has been available but I've seen it even in the OEM drivers from Acer. Here's a screenie.

 

Nice work mate. Props

 

It looks like you're running a dedicated card. I just picked up an Acer w/x1100 a couple days ago. I'll have to check it when I get home and see if also has this feature.

 

It should, it's a driver feature not hardware. If it doesn't, update the driver.

Thank you Zoomastigaphoria for pointing this out to me, I very much appreciate it.

 

Nice.

But if you want to game you want a dedicated option.

An IGP is nowhere near to becoming a replacement anytime soon.

I think this article may confuse some people.

 

It's about gaming on a REALLY tight budget. Not everyone can afford dedicated GPU's, and go for an IGP. They might want to know if they can run games.

 

Yup, sure enough, it's there. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

I don't think so. It was very clearly written to note that for users with the IGP option only (for whatever reason) they may still enjoy some of their favourite games on the go, albeit with restricted capability. It was definitetly not an endorsement for laptops with IGPs as gaming machines. Anyone confused by it probably shouldn't be operating a laptop anyway

 

Thanks a lot, Pulp. The GeForce 6150 is in the new HP tablet - the tx1000t, and I was wondering how Oblivion would play on it...so it's good to see your benchmarks.

 

"Impressive. Most impressive."

 

Some pretty nice points here ( 128MB memory etc ) .

Not a high res fan boy but 640X480 -- you must be desperate to play

 

When I started seriously 3D gaming on my desktop, I was running the original Unreal Tournament - in software - at 320x240. And I was totally blown away by it.

I'm old enough to remember when 640x480 was "hi-res," so it doesn't bother me that much. And look...I'm gonna be running an 8800GTS (640MB) in my desktop soon, so I do take my gaming seriously, but it's nice to know the Go 6150 can do in a pinch.

 

Why not R600
It's coming soon.

 

Even if they could run these games at the lowest settings, does that mean they will enjoy it? Maybe, most likely no.

I gave my cousin my old 6200 AGP card so he could play BF2142. He was all excited and what not because he could now run the latest games. Well I told him that he would have to play at the lowest settings. He didn't mind until he actually got into the gameplay. He got the game 3 months ago and hasn't played it in 2.

Mike.

 

Thats pretty impressive, but I think ATI's X700 based IGP (X1250?) will be a true gamers IGP (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron...)

 

I too remember those days. I used to play FF7 on 320x240 and longed for the day I could use the "hi-res" 640x480 mode. It still looks good actually on that resolution.

I'm curious to know how Half-Life 2 runs on the 6150. I get tremendous results with my Go 7400 but it runs terribly on the Intel GMA950 (Vaio SZ ). I guess the 6150 might be halfway in between.

 

Long time lurker, first time poster. And for those who recognize the handle; yeah, it's me.

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I just had to respond to a few things here. First of all, kudos to Pulp for taking the time to benchmark the high-end of "Ghetto Gaming" and write up a review on it. As much as people like to pooh-pooh integrated graphics, it's still a very big market segment, and more importantly, it represents the Lowest Common Denominator. If every IGP is capable of at least a certain level of performance, apps and games can be designed with that as a minimum spec.

I remember when my uncle got me a 3dfx card back in the days of Unreal (the original one.) Switching to that new renderer blew my mind.

The Tech Report has a good review of the 690G desktop chipset; the notebook variant should be similar in performance. It's looking like about a 20-25% bump over the Go6150 in terms of performance - FEAR just about doubled though.

"X700 based" is pretty generous as well - you could technically call the 6150 "G70 based" since the 6150 is technically a 7-series GPU. The X1250 only has four pixel pipes and offloads the vertex shaders onto the CPU. Still, with a beefy CPU, that shouldn't be an issue.

- M4H

 

Nice reporting! THANKS!!!

 

How does the 6150 run Sims 2? Planning to get a cheap laptop with the GPU.

 

Sims 2 will run great on the go6150. Just be sure your RAM is not going anywhere below 1gb.

 

Hi PULP, I read lots of ur posts from notebookreview.com and i really like ur graphic card reviews for laptops. Im considering 3 notebooks from hp compaq..one with Intel Core2duo but with GMA950 and another one with AMD Turion 64x2 Dual Core TL-52 but with geforce go 6150. The last one is with AMD Turion 64x2 Dual Core TL-52 but with the AMD M690T chipset and ATI Radeon x1250 up to 512 shared memory. Could u recommend which laptop i should buy? all the other specs like HDD,ram are all the same. I prefer to have a laptop which is good for gaming and also for doing work, using softwares like matlab, photoshop, and also converting movies...I would really like to play F.E.A.R on my future laptop...pls reply to my email..thanks..im really in a dilemma now..as in which laptop to buy...

 

giggsy, intel GMA950 is the worse modern integrated CPU available. C2D is better than Turionx2 (at same MHz) but in games graphics card is more important than CPU
GF6150/nforce430 is better than intel
ATI 1250/AMD M690 has more points in bechmaks than GF6150

 

Thanks kosh, yeap i really like the core2duo processor cos it is definately better than AMD turion 64x2 in terms of performance..after reading lots of of benchmarks...but it seems AMD Turion 64x2 has been in the market for quite some times..as well as Geforce 6150...which leads me to believe that its getting obsolete soon...is it worth the new AMD/M690 with ATI X1250 which has just come out? what do u recommend? the ati x1250 is currently a few hundred dollars more expensive than the laptop with geforce 6150..

 

If you want to game, I'd recommend trying to get a notebook with dedicated graphics. Some integrated cards might provide passable gaming experiences, but any dedicated card will provide your with a higher quality of gaming and will last longer before contemporary games are too demanding to play.

If you don't game, any card will do...but if you plan to game and haven't purchased a notebook yet, don't make the mistake of getting integrated graphics. I did once upon a time...

 

I have a HP dv2100 with the geforce go 6150, when I have wanted to play games it never really dissapointed. I have completed Tomb Raider Legend and half life 2 on it and both games looked fantastic and played fantastic..in xp, when I upraded to Vista and tried to play HL2 I went from 800x600, 6x antialiasing and all the rest turned on and it playing great..to it being virtually unplayable, stuttering non-stop, even in the lowest resolution with all turned off.

My 6150 can even play HL2 in the highest resolution if your not bothered about it jumping a little in more fast paced parts and it looks great, that said I recently bought the new harry potter game and it runs like crap even in the lowest resolution, didnt bother me though because the game turned out to be complete crap anyway.

 

Has anyone run FS 2004 on a laptop with the 6150 card? Can you post what settings you used, and how many frames per second you were able to get?
Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

 

I know this thread is old, but I was Googling my graphics card, and this came up.

You should be fine running FS 2004. I use it and it seems to work fine. I did have a problem with Combat Flight Simulator 3, but it was a defective disc, I think. I had the same problem with my old computer too.

But seriously, I was a little disappointed when I figured out what Future Shop had bamboozled me into buying (with the integrated chip), but I've been fine for most things. I've been running Civ 4, Half Life 2, Rise of Legends and Sims 2 on this computer and it's been running with very high quality. I tried to run BioShock on it with very little success. Most games should work much better if you turn of shadowing, but the game experience isn't the best. The 6150 works fine with RTS, but shooters are pushing it. Just buy a 360

 

In helping my friend shop for a laptop locally, they ended up picking the HP dv9429us at Circuit City. (nice little sale on it right now) I didn't get a chance to install any games on it, but the 17" screen is pretty freaking nice. It has 2gb of RAM so I'm wondering if the shared memory would be a problem. (I wouldn't think it would be unless you're running a gazillion tasks) I'm tempted to go buy one of these for myself, but not sure yet. The only games I ever play are sports games (Madden, NBA Live, FIFA), so I don't think they require as much horsepower / graphics power as your Flight Sim and shooter games. Seeing that I currently have a P4 2.66ghz laptop with a horrible Radeon Mobility 7500, anything has to be better than what I'm running now. (stuck at 640x480 / minimum settings for most games) Would this be a good buy for me? I've always tended to stay away from the box store computers and stick with Dell, but this HP really has me tempted. Thanks!

 

I happened to stumble upon this article. What a interesting read! I have an HP Pavilion dv2025, which includes a geforce go 6150. To my surpise, Half-Life 2 ran nicely and looked great. Pretty good for running on integrated graphics! Dreamfall: The Longest Journey also ran nicely, but only at lower resolutions and with some settings tweaking.

Overall, I'm imprised with what I can squeeze out of this thing! By no means is this a gaming machine, but it is perfect for a the casual gamer on a budget.

 

Finally I found this thread because I was not sure if GeForce 6150 Go is very old and I was not sure if it will play with Madden 08 and Civ4...I understand this is old thread...how about new driver for 6150 Go to work better with some games?

 

Well, in some cases if the current driver is poor then it would make a difference but overall the performance effect of the driver wont be too great. You might get a few more FPS but it cant change/make up for the hardware and in the end with the Go 6150 you are going to be limited by that rather than the driver.

 

FWIW, another notebook that uses the GeForce Go 6150 is the Medion MD96340 for $599 at ALDI stores (see http://aldi.us/us/html/offers/58_3884_ENU_HTML.htm). DEFINITELY under $1000.

 

Wow, this graphic chip can run Doom 3 at very playable frame rates with most effects turned off or on low, however, it still looks great!

 

wow im going to continue with this old thread but i apologize for prolonging it haha...im trying to run cs on the 6150 and it seems good during play but in smokes it drops significantly to 10 fps. is there anyway i can tweak the card in order to handle smokes and smooth out game play?