CBS vet Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 The video performance on an PIII 800 MHz IBM ThinkPad T21 equiped with 7.5M S3 on board adaptor, Win 98 DirectX 8.1 is not impressive. Black wedges like dark lightenings flashes in regular intervals. Any ideas to why? :confused: It is not easy the extend a portable with a new video adaptor. /Carsten 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 The S3 video chipset is not a really great 3D performer. S3 is now owned/manufactured by VIA and now uses that intellectual property for laptop and chipset-integrated video. I've heard of some new desktop chips coming in sometime late this year, but they are behind the performance curve. S3 in past made some decent chips, but the software support was lacking. Diamond Multimedia was one of their biggest and most popular OEM's (and they eventually bought them out to make only S3-based boards). NVidia and ATI both beat any S3 chipset performance-wise. Your Thinkpad probably included the S3 chipset as a cost saving feature. Unfortunately, even with them being owned by VIA, the driver support is still spotty. This is typically true of laptops and it is one of the reasons to avoid them as a primary gaming platform. Laptop manufacturers release video driver updates on a far less frequent basis than for desktop video cards. Even the NVidia GO laptop video chipset sees fewer driver updates than the rest of the GeForce desktop line. The problems you're seeing may not have a solution until S3/VIA update the drivers, which may not be real soon. Have you checked IBM's website for any driver updates (which will most likely have to come from them since many laptop video manufacturers won't release reference drivers for their laptop chipsets) ? In addition to your T21 model you'll need the 'Machine Type' code which is usually a four digit number (i.e. - 2648) and the 'Model' code which is a three-alphanumeric character sequence after the primary model number (i.e. - LT1). This info will usually be found on the manufacturer's sticker on the bottom of the laptop or on the lower portion of the LCD display's plastic bezel. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBS vet Posted February 18, 2002 Author Share Posted February 18, 2002 Sure, I was 'stuned, when I saw that the S3-driver was 2 years old in my virgin labtop. As you wrote IBM had the latest drivers on the website. Actually, it helped. I seems like all my complains just vannished. The 3D rendering om even snowing wether is almost as perfect as my desktop with a GeoF adaptor. Thank you very much for the tip. /carsten [ February 17, 2002, 06:14 PM: Message edited by: CBS vet ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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