N3 on Notebook

Hi, I am planning to buy a new notebook by the end of the year. The best 3D video boards on notebooks that I found so far are: a) Trident ***9225 with 2.5 Mb b) S3 ViRGE MX 3D with 2 Mb c) ATI Rage LT Pro with 8 Mb The processor can be Celeron 400, PII 366 and AMD K6-2 366. Can someone say if any combination will be OK to play N3? f not, are there any other configurations? Regards, Brian

> The Release Date of Nascar3 has been moved FORWARD to Sept. 15th. The original poster had no evidence to back up the middle of the month date. It is 10/2, folks.. -- * rrevved at mindspring dot com * unit.26 s.p.u.t.u.m. * http://www.cabal.net

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999 16:49:27 -0300, Be sure the notebook has a joystick or wheel. No keyboard control in N3. -- * rrevved at mindspring dot com * unit.26 s.p.u.t.u.m. * http://www.cabal.net

Reads like the choice of the lesser of the three evils. Ram might be the biggest consideration. More memory built in = more textures brought up fast. And there are certainly more in N3. I can recomend the Interact Ultraracer PC if this notebook is going to be actually used as a portable. It's small and works decently for travel. Going from a Wheel and pedals to it is a little jump, but not too hard. Plugs into a joystick port with no problems. Best Buy carries them in stock. For a wheel, I dunno, I've had a modified T1 forever now. Later. -Mark Gums

The only one of these that has "real" 3D capabilities is the ATI Rage Pro Lite....it even has open GL drivers for quake and the like. Make sure you get a Celeron or PII. The AMD doesn't have enough floating point umpf. Now when AMD comes out with a laptop Atholon chip...they will kick. -- [link lost in import] Digital Camera and Video Camera tidbit >Hi, >I am planning to buy a new notebook by the end of the year. The best 3D >video boards on notebooks that I found so far are: >a) Trident ***9225 with 2.5 Mb >b) S3 ViRGE MX 3D with 2 Mb >c) ATI Rage LT Pro with 8 Mb >The processor can be Celeron 400, PII 366 and AMD K6-2 366. >Can someone say if any combination will be OK to play N3? f not, are there >any other configurations? >Regards, >Brian

Trident and S3 are OLD, and I mean OLD, chipsets. If you plan to play ANY 3D game or heck any game on a notebook, be sure to get the ATI Rage LT Pro onboard. The Rage is approx. about the same in performance as the original Riva TNT. And yes, more onboard video memory is better for a number of reasons including the mentioned texture budget, resolution, etc. :)

Gee, and what will you say if it _does_ come out on 15/9? Ner-ner? Big deal. Ben...who suspects that certain people are revealing lack of a life

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>> The Release Date of Nascar3 has been moved FORWARD to Sept. 15th. >The original poster had no evidence to back >up the middle of the month date. It is 10/2, folks.. >-- >* rrevved at mindspring dot com >* unit.26 s.p.u.t.u.m. >* http://www.cabal.net

There is keyboard control in N3. Im absolutely, 100% sure well hmm.. ;-) The review that made mention of that simply wanted to say that keyboard driving is much more difficult than in previous version of Papyrus Stock-car simulators. And yes it's true. It's not "GPL-hard" in terms of keyboard driving, but you can't really expect to be near competitive using keyboard controls. -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

: I am planning to buy a new notebook by the end of the year. The best 3D : video boards on notebooks that I found so far are: : a) Trident ***9225 with 2.5 Mb : b) S3 ViRGE MX 3D with 2 Mb : c) ATI Rage LT Pro with 8 Mb Forget it. The first two are no hopers for hardware 3D. The ATI is marginal in Direct3D, but runs some programs like Need for Speed 3 reasonably well, so it might be alright for N3. On the horizon is the Savage/Mobile (not the old Virge MX) based on the Savage 4. It has texture compression and bump mapping, and a real OpenGL implementation, unlike ATIs flaky one, so perhaps (cross your fingers) you could even play GPL. The performance is in the same league as a current Voodoo2 in terms of Quake timedemos. If you need a notebook, maybe wait for this one, although its release keeps getting pushed back (I imagine they have heat problems). Stephen

: Trident and S3 are OLD, and I mean OLD, chipsets. If you plan to play ANY : 3D game or heck any game on a notebook, be sure to get the ATI Rage LT Pro : onboard. The Rage is approx. about the same in performance as the original : Riva TNT. : And yes, more onboard video memory is better for a number of reasons : including the mentioned texture budget, resolution, etc. :) Also, the new Savage/Mobile will have 16Mb or 32Mb of memory, plus AGP. I have been searching for this "holy grail" of notebook 3D. It looks like it is coming, but you can bet it will be in the high end (over $4000) notebooks for the first year. I've decided to forget about it, be happy playing GP2 on my old notebook while travelling, and pile much less cash into a killer desktop for home. If you have the cash for the next generation notebook, go for it, but it will still never quite match a desktop (but then again, other simmers will drool with envy if the OpenGL on the Savage works out and you can have GPL wherever you go) Stephen

Unfortunately, there is more to it than that. LCD's tend to have very slow decay rates. This causes 'bluring' with fast moving objects. If you are really serious about doing this with a Laptop, I would make sure that along with the appropriate 3D hardware, it has proper video-out so you can connect an external monitor. FWIW... -Larry