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February 15, 2006

More on the new toy

I had a real chance to play with my new laptop today. I messed around with a few different things to see what would happen on the machine, and the results were very interesting.

First, I wanted to see how the laptop would hold up to a Linux distribution. I brought with me a copy of an Ubuntu LiveCD to work to test during my downtime. Unfortunately, I discovered early on that the LiveCD that I had was bad, so that required me to download and burn another one. It was probably a better idea to download a fresh ISO, as there was a newer version of Ubuntu than I had.

What I discovered wasn't terribly interesting. The ATI video card that comes with my laptop, the Xpress 200M, doesn't work very well with Ubuntu 5.10. Apparently, after viewing the logs, it has something to do with the existing generic ATI driver. My assumption at this point is that I should be able to download the proprietary ATI driver from their support site and it should work just fine.

I also decided through the process that I wanted to stick with one distribution throughout my Linux process. Since I have Suse 10 on my desktop, I think that it only makes sense that I use Suse 10 on the laptop as well. So, after I re-partition this machine, I will be installing a copy of Suse 10 on it.

The second discovery today was also due tothe ATI card in the laptop. I spent the rest of the day downloading and installing Steam and Half-Life 2. I figured that if I was going to put this machine to the test, I might as well use a game with some kick ass graphics.

My surprise? It works REALLY well.

I played HL2 on my laptop today. And it looked great. I played through part of the first chapter, up until when Barney makes you escape out the window to get away from the guards trying to break down the door. The graphics were crisp and clean ... I saw no skips and the frame rate seemed to be pretty high. Granted, I didn't have a chance to turn on the frame rate thingie while I was playing (Amanda was waiting to go to dinner). Maybe next time I bring it up, I'll get a good frame rate to let everyone know how good it was.

Also, the settings for the video card aren't anything terribly special ... but it is configured to use real 3D. There isn't any software rendering at all.

~out...

Update: I decided to go into the game and setup the framerate thingie to see what the generic frame rate of the game on the laptop was. I was surprised at what I saw:

High 20's ... not bad at all in my opinion.

So, as you can see, I'm almost at 30 fps with a generic configuration. I didn't make any specific changes at all with this screenshot. I just launched the game and took a screenshot after starting the framerate counter. Now, the laptop is configured to use 64MB of system RAM for the videocard memory ... that needs to be bumped up. Additionally, my system memory needs to be bumped up as well to accomidate this change.

Also, the screen size for this was default to the laptop: 1280x800@60MHz. That higher screen size also has an effect on the frame rate as well as the generic video card settings. My guess is that with the proper configuration, I should be able to get at minimum up to 40 fps and my goal is to get it to 60 fps.

Posted by ed at February 15, 2006 09:46 PM

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