Gaming On A Netbook? 13 Great Titles Playable At 720p

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]hellfire24[/nom]PC>all[/citation]

Yeah, why not try lugging your watercooled monster around the airport?

 

[Markusx64]

who wants to play sucky old bad graphics games

 

[AstroTC]

Yay for Torchlight!! I crawled the **** outta those dungeons but if you guys are gonna play it start off on Hard or you wont enjoy it =]

 

[s3anister]

I've tried UT3 on an E-350 and it struggles at ultra-low resolutions.

A C-50 has far less juice, and if you *did* get it to work I doubt it'd be playable at 720p.

If you're talking about Unreal Tournament 3 then yes I'd be amazed if that game played on a netbook. I was specifically talking about UT2K4 which is not graphically demanding at low settings.

 

[Guest]

Portal - On Steam, works OK on ION based netbooks

 

[viridiancrystal]

massive props for having torchlight on this list. Amazing game.

 

[K-beam]

Another idea about the source games. There are actually different versions of the source engine. As far as I know the first game that had the original source engine was Half-Life 2. I remember being able to play it on a GeForce 6200 with a P4 1.5ghz. Then, around 3 years ago Valve updated HL2 to the version of the source engine used for Episode 2. I do remember that there is a mod that brings HL2 down to its original looks and hardware requirements. Maybe worth exploring if you want to game on a c-50

 

[tigger888]

This is what AMD trinity is for 😀

 

[DaFees]

If you don't care about playing on Battle.net then you can make Starcraft look good at any resolution.

Proof: http://www.starcraftresolutionhack.kilu.de/

 

[Krnt]

In a E-350 with a 1366x768 screen you can play many games using a decent resolution

I can confirm:
Hawx - looks awesome with some (huge) dips in heavy combat (max 115fps, min 12fps, Avg 35fps, built in bench) custom settings, CPU limited game.
NFS Carbon - Playable but at very low fps (driving games don't need to much fps), custom settings from 15 to 30fps.
NFS5 Porsche Unleashed - 60+
GTA2 - 60+

I would have liked to see Homeworld in the list.

 

[mamailo]

Fifa 2001 works very well.
Steam version of Alien Vs Predator is really cheap and is awesome

 

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

I'll probably be hated on and called a "weeaboo", but visual novels work great for older netbooks, especially those with 1024x600 displays. Thing is, most VNs use 800x600, and newer ones support 1024x576 as well, so in fullscreen (assuming you've enabled "preserve aspect ratio" in your GPU's control panel) everything will fit without upscaling, resulting in perfectly crisp text.

And even if you're not an otaku, there's still a couple awesome visual novels out there that even the average person could enjoy ("Fate/stay night" and "Steins;Gate" come to mind)

 

[theoneknownasnalyd]

You forgot to mention the Marathon FPS series through the AlephOne engine. I have used AlephOne under Windows XP and Linux on my Asus EeePC 1000HE, both versions of AlephOne ran smoothly on the native resolution. The games are so old that, despite the engine updates, there's nothing to cause a netbook any trouble (unless the hardware is incapable of using OpenGL, then there'd be no way to use the engine upgrades). Did I mention the game data is free? The engine is at source.bungie.org, and there should be links to download the game data that the engine will run.

 

[timaishu]

Are those netbooks equivilent to my 5 year old laptop?

AMD TurionX2 TL-64 @ 2.19ghz
2x1gb sticks of ram (reads at 1.87gb due to graphics sharing)
ATI x1250 with 128mb of shared ram

Anyways, I installed BF2 on it last night and I was able to run it with 3 of the settings on medium @800x600 with 2x AA. Looked good enough and played great! Got around 20fps on the lowside and about 28-30 on the high on the full size 64-player maps.

 

[imatt]

Since when is 25-30fps an acceptable framerate for gaming?

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]imatt[/nom]Since when is 25-30fps an acceptable framerate for gaming?[/citation]

Since someone wanted a reasonable minimum guideline, I reckon.

 

[Guest]

Tomb Raider Anniversary ,you can even bump the texture details up,and lower the lighting,heck even runs great on my old inspiron 8200 ati mr9000 1600*1200.

 

[wortwortwort]

I managed to get KOTOR working on Windows 7.

 

[Guest]

What is the name of this thing i must know!!!

 

[jeremiah j johnson]

great notebook. I don't game a lot but I sure would have a better opportunity if I were using a notebook for gaming. I always have my laptop of notebook with me when I travel which in my so it only makes sense to have things set up for gaming.

 

[decembermouse]

Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight

should be

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

 

[olaf]

lets be hones that WOW has horrible system req, i can't see it run properly on anything but a gaming laptop, if you are using addons, and are raiding.

 

[Raid Z3ro]

League of Legends?

 

[Guest]

I have subnotebook 13" with 2430M cpu and 6630M graphics - lenovo edge E320. Uncomparably better. Unbelieveably strong for such a small machine. Even have 6+ hours with battery saver (HD3000).

 

[Guest]

No Minecraft?

Why mention Civ V? Civ 4 is the last good Civ and the last one that ran smoothly.