Looking to play Fallout 3 at ultra for less than $300

Ohsnapitskale

Commendable
Sep 28, 2016
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1,510
Kind of catching up on games I missed. Would like to play games like Fallout 3, Gothic 3, and Elder Scrolls Oblivion on ultra settings. Budget is $300
 
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A laptop that can play Fallout 3 on ultra even at 720p for $300? Easy... none.




Fallout 3 can be played on Win 7 and Win 8.1. I never had a compatibility problem running Fallout 3 with those OSes. However...

Fallout 3 and Oblivion (both use the same Gamebryo game engine) can be played using Intel HD graphics, but the game engine does not recognize integrated graphics (at least for Intel) to be valid graphic cores without a workaround. You need a d3d9.dll file that basically tricks the game into thinking the...

JeffDaemon

Honorable
Nov 22, 2013
235
0
11,110
I tried looking for benches and video of these games on modern budget CPUs and couldn't come up with anything. No one plays these games any more, benchmarks or otherwise. The only problem I see is ULTRA settings usually need 1080p and AA of some level. Both of these are incredibly weak when it comes to onboard GPUs, in part I suspect the memory bandwidth between system ram impacts high resolution gaming.

I saw a nvidia 920m with fallout 3 on high settings 720p and it was bouncing close to 30fps. IMO the nvidia x20m series of chips have been kind of pointless because they are almost the same amount of power as what ever CPU was in the laptop at the time. So even budget GPUs have their limits on old games.

I suspect if you find an AMD A8 or a10 series laptop (most likely more than $300) you will have one foot in the door. Otherwise you will need to nock it down a notch or two. Also theres the part that you WILL actually be gaming at 720p since there are no 1080p laptops at $300.
 
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Guest

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AMD Radeon 480 would probably do it, but Fallout 3 is a game that can't even run well on Windows 7. You need to run it on Windows XP (ickk!). It's really a mess. I have a Radeon 480, let me test it, I'll get back to you in a few hours.
 
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Guest

Guest
Oups. Well, again, I don't think that Fallout 3 will run on anything else than XP or Vista. From a purely technical point of view, I'd assume most IGP from Intel COULD run it, but it's pretty much a dead game at this point.
 
A laptop that can play Fallout 3 on ultra even at 720p for $300? Easy... none.




Fallout 3 can be played on Win 7 and Win 8.1. I never had a compatibility problem running Fallout 3 with those OSes. However...

Fallout 3 and Oblivion (both use the same Gamebryo game engine) can be played using Intel HD graphics, but the game engine does not recognize integrated graphics (at least for Intel) to be valid graphic cores without a workaround. You need a d3d9.dll file that basically tricks the game into thinking the Intel HD graphics core is a dedicated GPU and will allow you to play the game. It can be obtained from the following link.

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/20371/?


The d3d9.dll file was originally created for the "Oldblivion" project. Oblivion was the first DirectX 9 game to be released. At the time a lot of people only had DirectX 8 GPUs. The d3d9.dll tricked the game engine into thinking the DX 8 GPU was a DX 9 GPU and allowed the game to run. Oblivion was able to run, but it kinda look bad from screenshots that I've seen because DX8 GPUs lacked features which DX 9 GPUs had.


For $340 the following Asus laptop is pretty much the best you can hope for..Spending less will basically get you an entry level laptop with very budget oriented CPUs with integrated graphics that are basically good enough to watch movie and play very simple games. The are the same CPUs that are used in Windows tablets. The laptop has a Core i3-5010u CPU (2.1GHz) with the Intel HD 5500 and a 1080p screen, but you should play the game at either 720p or 900p resolution. You also need to edit the Fallout3.pref file to disable all shadows which can improve performance by at least 6 FPS.

https://www.amazon.com/Asus-F555LA-AB31-15-6-Inch-i3-5010U-Processor/dp/B011KFQASE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475157343&sr=8-1&keywords=asus+core+i3-5010u


I actually installed both Fallout 3 and Skyrim on my laptop with Core i5-4200u and Intel HD 4400 graphics core (disabled the dedicated GPU) and Windows 8.1 since a friend of mine wanted to play those games on a laptop with similar specs, but no dedicated GPU. Fallout 3 generally ran better since it was an older game, but both games had similar minimum FPS performance. At 1600x900 resolution and some custom settings to a good balance between image quality (mostly a mix of low and medium) and performance, I was able to get something like 30 FPS - 60 FPS for Fallout 3 and 30 FPS - 45 FPS for Skyrim. This was during the summer of 2015.

Skyrim does support Intel HD graphic so no workaround is necessary.
 
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