IIRC that was the ideal GPU to play Half-life 2. My 9700m could not keep up. I was only 16 at the time, so I fell for the lies from the DELL salesman when I was buying my first gaming machine for that game. He told me that mobile GPUs are almost as good as desktop GPUs, and that the 9700m was almost as good as the 9800 desktop card. It was not.

Barely got 30 FPS on medium, and I couldn't run it at the laptop's native resolution of 1900x1200. Had to settle for 1280x800 and the crappy upscaling of the time.

I worked my ass off an entire summer for that stupid brick of a laptop (it was a first gen XPS, BTW), and it couldn't even do 60 FPS in the latest games. I was betrayed so hard by that purchase that I learned how to build my own PCs so I'd never have to settle for an overpriced "gaming" laptop ever again.

[–] khannie 2 points 1 year ago

Oh jeez. Fuck that salesman. :( That's an awful thing to do to a kid. Money comes so hard at that age.

I had a self build and a decent CRT at the time so scaling wasn't an issue but I remember how horrible it was in those days on LCDs. It actually put me off moving from the CRT for a long time.

I definitely overclocked that card and it was really good for that even on the stock cooler but I do vaguely remember it struggling with HL2. I can't remember what CPU I had so that could have been the bottleneck.