About Chris Morrison Expertise Installation of cards. Difference between card types. What card is best for your purpose. Driver problems. All video issues.
Experience 15 years experience with building, repairing and upgrading PCs. Technical support experience.
Organizations Help on the Net
Education/Credentials Associates Degree in Information Technology
A Certified
Expert: Chris Morrison Date: 7/24/2008 Subject: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
Question Can the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 play games that need 256MB nicely?
Answer Depending on what chipset your motherboard is using and how the onboard graphics is configured. The intel model can have dedicated memory, but is usually not much. Most of it's memory comes from shared or your system memory.
The output is similar to the GeForce FX 5500 series. You can play some games like guild wars or wow pretty well. Most higher end games are going to require you to have a better video card though.
If you are unsure if a certain game is going to play using your current video, just go to the games website and download their demo. If the demo plays pretty well you should be able to play the game itself.\
If the demo does not play well the game itself will be worse as with updates most games start to demand more from video.
Always remember this video adapter is going to use mostly shared memory. So if you only have 1 gig of memory and the adapter wants 256 megs, you are now down to 744 megs for the system.
I suggest adding memory if you have to use this adapter, also making sure you have the newest video driver will help improve performance.
