As you all know, the Sony TR-series uses integrated graphics dubbed Extreme Graphics 2 (aka Montara) built into the the Intel 855GM chipset. It’s a DirectX 8 capable graphics accelerator however, it lacks any hardware Transform and Lighting capabilities limiting some of its performance.
I ran a few tests to demonstrate what you can expect from this chipset.
As you can see, Quake 3 performance really isn’t so bad. I ran the program with the default settings so it’s possible to squeeze out more frames per second with a little tweaking. The above benchmarks indicate 32-bit color mode. Running at 16-bit color increases frame rates another 10 frames per second. Also, I only tested with widescreen resolutions since the engine supports it.
Unreal’s engine is much more demanding and even at 640x480 (with default settings) the gameplay is decent but no spectacular. I played for a while and it was ok but not nearly as fluid and fun as Quake 3.
I also ran a few other games to see how well it plays. I don’t have exact performance numbers for these games but I’ll leave you with some of my observations.
Serious Sam: Second Encounter - performance at 640x480 is pretty good and playable. Anything higher starts to get a little choppy. 800x600 isn’t too bad but 1024x768 is not playable at all.
Neverwinter Nights - You can run this at native resolutions of 1024x600 and 1280x768 but performance might be a little slow. At 1024x600, performance is good once you start playing. It starts out choppy but smooths out once it starts running. You do have to run the game at the “fastest” settings (equating to lowest graphic quality) but the game still looks pretty decent.
Warcraft III - This game plays very well at 800x600 and even at 1024x768. I was pleasantly happy to find this out. 800x600 is the best though and you can play it in 16 or 32-bit color although 16-bit will be better when things get crazy.
If anyone else has good experiences with gaming on their Sony TRs then please share with us the game and how the experience is.
