8. Spellforce 2

Analysis Of Results

Since Age of Empire 3 and Black & White 2 came along, it's become clear that real-time strategy and world-building games demand powerful graphics cards and increased pixelshader power. Water and lighting effects hammer performance on weaker graphics chips like the Mobility Radeon X1400 in the Aspire 5672 WLMi and make this game unplayable. For the GeForce Go 7800 GTX in the Alienware notebook, frame rates run in an acceptable range. Both the notebooks from HP and Asus with Mobility Radeon X1600 chipsets come with outmoded graphics drivers. Though you can load and start Spellforce 2 on these machines, as soon as you load a playing field on either of them, the notebook crashes with a blue screen. There are also problems with FAT-32 formatting on hard disks, as with the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi. On this machine, the game wouldn't run until the file system was converted into NTFS format.

This game didn't support native display resolutions for any of these systems, either.