For those gamers wanting to know how the Intel GMA900-based UMPCs perform (see list of UMPCs below.) there’s a list of compatible games on the Intel website.  The list was created in 2004 (which gives you some idea about how old these chipsets are.) but has been updated since then so you’ll find some newer games in there too.

Ultra Mobile PCs with the Intel GMA900 GPU: Samsung Q1, ASUS R2H, Founder Mininote, Tablet Kiosk i7200 series, Fujitsu P1510d, JVC XP741, JVC XP941, Toshiba Libretto U100.

The Sony UX has the GMA950 so should have a slightly better performance. The Flybook V33i with its ATi mobility GPU should be about the same as the Vaio UX.

Here’s the list of games.

I tested one game from the list – Need For Speed Underground to see what Intel really means by ‘compatible.’ It wasn’t really a pleasant experience. I had to disable the touchkit program and use Notebook Hardware Control to pin the CPU to 1Ghz. Even after that, the game speed was never consistent. At some points I though, yeah, this is superb and then a second later it would be running at half speed. I know the graphics card has a dual-mode (clockrate) so I tried to change some settings in the drivers software but it didn’t make much difference. OK, that was just one game so others could be better.

What I did notice though is that under battery power, the BIOS prevents the clockrate from going above 800Mhz. This really cripples the game and makes it unusable. As far as I’m concerned, The OS (through ACPI) is what should be controlling this. I’ve already spoken to TabletKiosk about it and “Tablet Kiosk engineers are cautiously evaluating this issue but there is no resolution yet.”

If you have any good gaming experiences using the Intel GMA900, let me know. Otherwise it looks like we have a gaming problem on our hands. The GMA X3000 due as part of the Santa Rosa mobile computing platform (and a possible solution for UMPCs) has a vastly different architecture and old games just won’t be able to take advantage of it. There will be very little performance advantage (ref) until new software is written that uses DirectX 10. That is of course if games designers decide even to consider this low-end graphics solution.

Steve / Chippy.

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