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You can install the latest ATI drivers on a notebook but you first need to use the Mobility Modder on them.
http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

Radeon X600 is considered a legacy GPU now though so make sure you download drivers that do support it. Basically make sure you choose it specifically from their drop down lists.

Also be sure to UNINSTALL the old drivers through Add/Remove Programs before installing new drivers.

There's nothing wrong with ATI's current lineup. Their lineup before the 38x0 series was the issue. Radeon 2400, 2600 were very meh and 2900 was a furnace and slow compared to 8800 usually.

NV's options below 8800 were poor back in '07 too, but still better than ATI's 2400/2600 for games. 8600GTS was significantly less than half as fast as an 8800 series card and was slower than the cheaper 7900 options. But then they brought out the 9600GT which was great, and 8800GT/8800GTS 512/9800GT/9800GTX that are all based on G92 and great. The GTX 260 and 28x are awesome boards in many ways but too expensive compared to ATI's top stuff. They probably cost quite a bit more to build than a ATI 48x0 due to the huge GPU and the 512 bit bus.

The current landscape has ATI and NVIDIA on equal footing basically except ATI is much more aggressive with their prices. ATI has sweet options at every price point.

I'd rather have the GTX 1gb than a 4890 2gb, if only for the huge 512bit buffer on the GTX.

If ATI could squeeze a 512bit buffer on their GDDR5... The skies will open and the birds will sing.

GDDR5 on 4870/4890 give ATI an effective 512-bit performance because it's quad data rate. The physical 256-bit bus gives ATI a much cheaper board (a lot fewer traces), and it may not even be possible to put a 512-bit bus on their GPU because it's a good bit smaller than NV's GTX 2x0 GPU. You need room for all those pads on the GPU packaging. This cost savings is a win for both ATI and us (see prices.)

I think the only disappointing aspect of 48x0 is that they use a lot of power when idle. A lot more than a GTX 2x0 card.

yeh i've got a mobility radeon HD2600 in my laptop. Its actually really good. Handle's much higher settings much smoother than my nVidia GeForce 7600 LE.

Well compared to that it's probably better yeah but HD 2600 isn't that great. A desktop 7600GT is probably faster, and a GeForce 8600GT is definitely faster. The first mid/low-end DX10 chips were rather disappointing... One thing very nice about them though is their HD video acceleration features.

I'm using a Athlon XP 2000+ as a TVPC. It has only 1GB but has a GeForce 7300 GT.

The original Athlon 'thunderbird' was faster than a similarly clocked PIII, and it was cheaper too. I used to own one and compared to anything else at the time things would just fly. It was my first real bz2 playing machine and even with the crappy geforce2, I could get about 60FPS on low settings.

Oh of course TBird was a great CPU. I actually had a Duron 800 @ 1000 for a year or so back then. It's just that today people should probably move on from such hardware and not ask voluntary developers to make their code compatible with it. IMO anyway.

Although I did originally play BZ2 on a PIII 450 with a Matrox G400.

I've run TA5 on a Pentium III 1400 with a Radeon 8500 and it ran very well. As in completely fluidly. How retro can you go? That hardware is from 2001 or so. It's only about a year newer than the game itself!

TA5 is really quite amazing IMO. Offloading work to the GPU makes the game less demanding than ever before.

That enabled SSE code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions, and note that it's SSE1, not any of the later versions) to accelerate lighting calculations. This produced slightly different tints on objects, something that people either liked or not.

I remember when I originally got BZ2 and I had a early PIII 450. I played with this option and didn't notice much speed change or anything. But I did notice that rendering changed slightly, just by watching the paused scene behind the options menu. I kinda wondered if the option was primarily there to please Intel as a sponsor.

I've always wondered just what the option called "Pentium III enhancements" (or similar) in the original BZ2 release did. Does anyone know?

AHadley's post helped a lot.

Yeah the headlights REALLY kill performance when the light sources start to build up in a scene. My Radeon 4670 plummets to single digits fps in battles with headlights on. Crazy.

Should have posted this at the outset.  I'll add to the list as I wake up...

1. Spotlights - They're really expensive in DX9, so copy this section out of GamePrefs.ini into LocalPrefs.ini and tweak the setting downwards until it works okay on your rig:

This is interesting.

What if one's running one of the modern DX10 cards that has stupid amounts of vertex shader power cuz of the ability to devote the entire shader core to just that? Is the performance impact mostly pertinent for older cards?

I'm surprised that we aren't at a point where hardware TCL performance isn't just insane and can easily handle whatever BZ2 could toss its way.

Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB, Radeon 4670 PCIe (Cat 9.6), Realtek HD audio, Vista & XP x64
- Vista: vsync has jitters for some reason. Going without Vsync smooths things out but obviously causes tearing.
- XP & Vista: local fog causes a massive frame rate drop in some places on the tropical MPI map. From maxed out framerate to single digits.
- XP & Vista: lots of action causes some sound popping. Seems like a PCI bus contention thing perhaps. Dunno.


It does seem quite stable which is very nice. Happy to see more GPU acceleration used too. I actually ran it on a old Radeon 8500 and it was quite fast even on there.

I just wanted to post and say that it works on my old P3 system with a Radeon 8500 in XP. It runs really well too actually.