Playing Civ on a laptop: Intel GMA X3100

[DynamicSpirit]

I'm just in the process of buying a laptop. Mainly for professional use (Visual Studio etc.) while travelling, but I will play Civ on it too. I'm trying to avoid a machine with a dedicated graphics card for both cost and battery life reasons, and I've noticed a lot of the laptops with integrated graphics use Intel GMA X3100 for their graphics. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience playing Civ4 on such a machine, and what it's like? Is Civ4 reasonably playable? (If not, anyone know if any other integrated graphics setup offers sufficient power for Civ?)

Thanks!

 

[erm4gh]

I have a desktop PC (HP a6400f) running Vista with a Intel GMA 3100 w/128MB, 2.2GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core and 3GB of memory. Both Civ IV and Beyond the Sword run fine on it.

I bought this machine only two weeks ago and had originally planned on adding a graphics card later on since I was going to buy "Sins of a Solar Empire". I was surprised that it ran fine with that game too (its a real time strategy game with lots of graphics detail, not a turn based game like Civ IV) - in fact I raised the resolution to my normal screen resolution (1280 x 1024) and still had good performance at the highest texture/quality settings. On the other hand I suspect you'd have major problems with a FPS game.

My concern would not be the graphics, but how much memory you have. Civ IV needs a lot of memory to avoid problems towards the end of large or huge games. However, if you're running VC++ I'd assume you'd get 2GB or more anyways.

 

[berke_]

Hi, I just installed Civ4 BTS on my older laptop, with Intel 3100 chipset and 1GB of memory. It runs fairly well, apart from being a bit slower in the final phase of the games, or if I play with many civs (more than 12), but this must be due to the lack of memory.

Anyway, I'm experencing some graphic oddities:
-LH animations are smooth, but sometimes they miss some parts... eg. Shaka has "lost" his "crown" (can post screenshot if needed)
-Units are not centered on the tiles, they seem to be "hovering" the terrain.

In fact, i just joined the forums to ask information about these minor issues...