Centrino and UT2k3

I've a question for all you technically minded folks out there. I've got a Centrino 1.4ghz notebook and just recently installed my copy of UT2003. I held off because I kind of expected the performance to suck as most of my other FPS don't really seem to jump for joy over it.

UT absolutely screams on my notebook! I've got a full 1gb RAM and a Radeon Mobility 9000 and this sucker just cruises. I've experience no slow down at all and am wondering why. My older Unreal engine games like UT or Deus Ex are simply unplayable because they're so fast.

Is it because of the ridiculous size of cache RAM (1mb) on the processor itself or something else?

The PentiumM chip (not to be confused with Pentium4M) is a great little chip, much better performance than a P4 at the same clock. More like an Athlon in performance to simplify it. So you''re looking at about the performance of a P4 2Ghz, with a Radeon M 9000....so yeah, that will chew non-DX9 games up and spit them out.

-James

UT and Deus Ex shouldn''t run unplayably fast. They should just run smoothly.

However, I think the Centrino does some strange tricks with clocking itself up and down in order to save power. Because of this, some games get tricked into thinking that they are running on a much slower machine than they really are. The game starts up and the logic detects that there is a 500mhz processor available. Meanwhile, the computer detects that some sort of demanding game application is running and boosts the processor''s mhz to 1500 mhz. The game''s internal timing loops get screwed up, and it looks as though the game is running two or three times faster than real time.

I wonder if there is some application out there that permanently locks the Centrino in it''s highest speed mode. This would probably fix the problem.

Yes, the Centrino seems to be a pretty good chip. Though I haven''t read any technical analysis, I guess it is probably designed sort of like AMD''s Athlon chip in that it gets a lot more performance per mhz, but isn''t able to clock as high.

Yeah, I''ve had that probem polq is talking about. For example when I first started NWN and it ran that speed test, it only detected at 600mhz, even though it is 1.6ghz.

In the bios you can set it for maximum performance and I think that should keep it bumped to the max.