Has it really been ten months? I guess the blog was more active when I was testing old graphics cards, because without those, life is generally boring. Now that the old PC has been dismissed, there is not much I can do about that (I did try setting it up again some months ago… turns out the Soundblaster 16 is fried, and that makes me sad because that thing was a beauty). But here’s perhaps something else to tide me over, another chance to dig into the past. And that something is an Acer Aspire One 725.
Some context first. Do you remember the netbook craze of 2007? At the time, everyone wanted one of those things, no matter how slow they actually were. The craze continued for a while, until users started getting savvy and realizing that perhaps they were missing out on, you know, not waiting for your life to end while the netbook was loading Youtube. Still, it went on for a time, and in 2012 yours truly got one for himself. In truth netbooks were already on the way out by that point, and I only bought it due to a work trip, but in the end didn’t really use it much for work. In fact, it was bad enough that I didn’t use it for much of anything. Nine years later, I just decided to exhume it back from the earth, to test the limits of human patience. And maybe play some old games.
The idea of using a netbook to play games is perhaps not as exciting as using an old PC to play games. While they are both slow, the old PC allows you to play things that would perhaps be incompatible with modern Windows. On the other hand, a netbook only lets you play modern games, except they run like crap. Seems like a rough deal.
The specs are bad enough on paper. The Brazos architecture, based on Bobcat cores, was one of AMD’s first mobile APUs, and it harkens from an era when they thought it would be a good idea to sacrifice some CPU power to increase GPU performance. That’s great until you realize that there’s simply not enough CPU grunt to carry any meaningful games anyway. You know how well Half-Life 2 Lost Coast runs at 1366×768 and medium details? Pretty bad, 17fps. Now what happens if you drop it down to 640×480 and minimum details? It increases to a whopping… 19fps. See, in the end the GPU is not so terrible, but it’s pointless because you are going to be bottlenecked by the CPU anyway. At least the slideshow will look a little prettier at high resolution.
Like I said, the HD7290 is a bit more capable than average. Note that average by 2012 netbook terms means horrible even by 2007 computer standards. It’s hard to find something to compare it to, but the specs make it seem relatively close to the old Radeon HD 2400 Pro: twice the shaders count at half the core clock, more bandwidth but it’s shared with the processor… should be close enough. Of course, being close to a very low budget GPU of its time is not much to brag about. And at least you were going to pair that with a decent CPU (hopefully).
On the plus side, I replaced the original 2GB DD3-667 stick with a faster 4GB DDR3-800. I’m sure that’s not going to cause any issues or blow up the netbook or anything. I really needed the extra resources to make it a bit more bearable. And with it actually working again, I had a chance to finally test some games.
At first I was pessimistic. But a quick test of MDK2 at 1024x768x32 made me unexpectedly hopeful. An average of 60fps? Yeah, some strange CPU frametime spikes, but by and large very smooth. So perhaps Lost Coast was too much, but a game from 2000 was well within reach. But it turns out MDK2 may have been very well optimized, because other games struggled.
Serious Sam (The First Encounter, of course, because this thing would never manage HD) runs okay, but the Karnak demo doesn’t reach 60fps even on 1024×768, low settings, and few enemies around. I wonder what will happen when I get to a war scene. Painkiller similarly has to be set to low details and 800×600 to be playable, and note that playable here doesn’t mean 60fps at all, more like 30-40fps with drops. Of course, I’m talking cutting edge games for their time here. If we move to the lower end of the scale, Ys Origin runs very smooth, Sid Meier’s Pirates! is quite playable, and Crazy Taxi 3 is not terrible either. Mind, House of the Dead 2 is simply too slow. I guess there’s Dreamcast port and Dreamcast port (ok, technically Xbox for CT3, but it looked like a DC game anyway).
This computer might be good to play some games from the 90’s instead, but since it’s running on Windows 8.1 (tried updating to 10, it was even slower, so I eventually reverted) compatibility would be an issue. Modern ports to the rescue! Who doesn’t enjoy some GZDoom? Apparently the netbook doesn’t, because it runs quite choppy. Yes, freaking Doom doesn’t run well. It could run on a toaster, and not here. These modern ports tend to have higher system requirements than the original games, and unfortunately it shows. eDuke32 is good enough in classic rendering mode (not Polymer or Polymost alas, so no true 3D for me). Yamagi Quake 2 isn’t bad, but 800×600 is required to stay above 60fps. Anything DOSBox seems to only work well enough at 320×200.
I’ll have some chances to play these games in the future, as I’m going to move this netbook to a different place. Technically there’s nothing stopping me from just playing these games on my faster computer right now. But that will give me something to do later. It will also allow me to finally get some mileage from a device I bought nine years ago: no nostalgia here (Charles Foster Kane would not approve), I just like getting some use out what I paid for. And besides, to quote Soul Reaver, “you should respect the power bestowed by a limitation overcome”. But whoops, Soul Reaver doesn’t work. I should choose my quotes better next time.
A Few Steps 