PC demos with good 3D capabilities?

[Gapporin]

Hey all,

Last week, I just purchased a shiny new laptop for my personal use, and so far I've been putting it through the paces. However, I haven't really played any games or done anything of that sort yet. So I was wondering: What are some good PC demos that I can play that would be a good yardstick to test what my graphic card can (and can't) handle? Thanks in advance!

[cyberfluxor]

What is the graphics card and how much memory? That's the best judge. Unless you paid $2000+ then chances are it's not a powerhouse laptop but can get a good job done. If there's an onboard graphics card then most likely it can't do shading most newer games require.

[Gapporin]

It's an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 with 256MB video memory (and 512MB RAM). I don't really expect it to do the newest whiz-bang stuff, but I would still like a gauge of what it can and can't do.

[Jorpho]

3DMark seems to be the standard for these things. I don't particularly trust the numbers it spits out, but you can at least see if the framerate keeps up at different resolutions while showing different things.

[BHvrd]

I would recommend the Half Life 2 demo.

Not quite as resource hungry as say Doom 3, and used by more game engines. If you can run that you can play some cool games. Oblivion, Doom 3, Quake 4, etc are probably gonna be outta your league.

Again Though there are/were some really good games using this engine, and well it just don't get much better than Half Life 2 anyway. Still gorgeous to me.


http://www.fileplanet.com/filelist.aspx?s=100432&v=0

[Overbite]

he should be able to run doom 3, but oblivion is out.

[diskoboy]

Supreme Commander is worth a try.

[Gapporin]

I would recommend the Half Life 2 demo.

Thanks! I was thinking about Half-Life 2 m'self, but I wasn't sure if there actually was a demo (and if it was even Steam-free). But I downloaded it and tried it out. It looks nice, but the framerate is way too choppy and the sound stutters (not to mention it took a ridiculously long time to load). I don't think the problem here is my graphics card (which seemed to handle everything nicely), but my lack of memory in this computer. It was probably going to be the first thing I upgraded in this laptop, anyways.

Oddly enough, I also downloaded Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and that seems to work really good. It's not quite as nice looking, but it's very smooth and plays really well.


Supreme Commander is worth a try.

I've heard those words bounced around this board every once in a while, but I'm not quite sure what exactly it is. So...what exactly is it? And do you know where a demo might be perused at? :)

Thanks for the recommendations, everyone!

[Overbite]

I think supreme commander would make his computer explode and he'll fall out of his chair. I heard it's a resource hog and unoptimized. I'm not into RTS games because I'm an idiot so I haven't played it

[diskoboy]

I've heard those words bounced around this board every once in a while, but I'm not quite sure what exactly it is. So...what exactly is it? And do you know where a demo might be perused at? :)

Thanks for the recommendations, everyone!

Download the demo here. But overbite is correct - Supreme Commander is a resource hog. But your specs sound okay.

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_demos.html

Even though this is Nvidia's site, and they have alot of good demos here.

[Trebuken]

Windows XP or Vista?

You might try Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It's a good yardstick. Newer than HF2 but not too new.