Quote: "I said why, Intel graphics, even though shader 2/3, don't use vertex pipes (it's emulated in CPU), and games complain/fallover even DBP shadows falls over"
Intel GMA X3000, nForce 6100 or AMD X1250
are all of the current on-board chipset cards used in laptops.
While history has mentioned that Intel should be avoided like the plague; with the X3000 GPU I'd actually say this isn't the case.
Obviously if you can get a full GPU, that doesn't fall-back on the processor for Vertex Shaders .. then go for that.
All of the on-board gpu use a CPU VS system (including AMD and NVIDIA) what's more is the 6100 and X1250 only support VS/PS up to SM2.0; where-as the X3K supports up to SM3.0; what's more is the X3K is quite considerably quicker than the other two.
None of the cards are really slow either, performance wise they're fairly on-par with their PCI-E equivilants.
As far as which to get XP or Vista. If you want better performance in modern games; then XP. For everything else Vista.
I've been able to get far more older games running in Vista, quicker and more stable. Multi-Core support is built-in for all processor types not just classic variations like Pentium-D.
Generally Vista runs quicker than XP. Only issue I've had with performance is the hard disk seems to slow the rest of the system down when accessing between HDD and Memory. Quite irritating when playing games like Half-Life 2.. as I get a nice steady 60fps; only every few seconds when I go into a new area that while loaded, has to grab it from the pagefile that stops or lags for a couple of moments. Makes gameplay through HL2 itself quite irritating as you have to drop down the quality because of lack of memory rather than lack of graphics performance.
That all said, I've been able to get more older games working under Vista than would work in XP. Right now playing through System Shock 2 again
