We can’t hope the ASUS A3500L to be fast in games as it uses an integrated graphics subsystem. You can see that in the tests of 3DMark 2001 SE Pro at different graphics quality settings:
Modern DirectX 9.0 games were invented not for this notebook. You can play them at the worst graphics quality settings, but higher settings would only make a slideshow out of the game. Moreover, this graphics subsystem doesn’t support Game 4 test, Environment Bump Mapping, Pixel Shader 2.0, Advanced Pixel Shader at all.
It’s the same in Unreal Tournament 2003 ?the integrated graphics subsystem of the A3500L cannot be considered a proper replacement of a discrete graphics processor.
The diagram follows:
Next, I tested the notebook in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:
- 640x480; 16 bit; Lighting:Vertex; Detail:Low; Texture Quality:16 bit; Texture Filter:Bilinear;
- 1024x768; 32 bit; Lighting:Lightmap; Detail:High; Texture Quality:32 bit; Texture Filter:Trilinear.
The results are presented in the following table:
The fps rates in Quake 3 are expectedly low ?note also the almost fivefold difference in speeds at different graphics quality settings. The notebook doesn’t practically reduce its speed when powered by its own battery due to the above-explained reasons. The following diagram is based on the numbers from the table above:
