Got a new laptop
 

Bought a new laptop

Extended it to 2GB RAM, so now I;m hoping to finally be able to play Civ4 at a decent speed. Will have to do some serious business installation before civ is installed but will keep you posted on performance.

Great move but are you sure Civ IV will run with the ATI?

I have no trouble with CivIV and ATIs - neither here, nor on the (now stolen) laptop, nor at work.

Good one, ProPain! :) I hope to get a new laptop, too, once my new job in Berlin starts. So please do give feedback here how yours performs!

I've always had ATI cards on my laptops (they appear to be the MicroSoft of mobile graphics :)) and I've always been quite pleased with them. I ran Civ on someone elses laptop that I used for a while. Also an HP with ATI, about 1.5 years old machine, and it ran surprisingly well so I expect it to do better on this one.

I would be seriously disappointed if CivIV wouldnt run on this one cause I counted on it when entering the pitboss earth game. I need to be able to play at work as well cause I dont always have time in the evening.

Get it up and running soon then and keep us posted!

ATI X1600 is supposed to have shader 3.0, so Civ4 should be running well on this one. I've just upgraded my 9200 Radeon to X1550 to be able to play Neverwinter Nights 2 and other less ancient games (like MTW 2 at reasonable graphic settings) and it is working well so far and is completely compatible with everything. Just don't forget to download new drivers from ATI website and may be even uninstall the Catalyst software. The only thing needed are the drivers, that other crap coming with them is not required and it just slows everything down.

you'll be fine
My laptop has the far older single core Pentium M and Nvidia 5650go graphics (the the equivalent at the time as the mobile radeon 9600 and it was supposed to be far better for graphics peformance).

Your only bottle neck is the 5400rpm drive, which will slowdown huge maps, you only have 1 gig ram, so the game will probably start using virtual mem (hard disk) when there are lots of cities and units for the AI to handle. I never tried large maps, standard is ok. Huge maps is a no no for me.

I have 2 GB RAM, extended it right away (it's even in my 1st post [:p])
Needed that for Civ4 and Wow mainly as word usually runs fine with 1 GB. Now all I need is more time toplay so I can really use those 2GB to the max :)

I've run civ on an ATI9600 and an X800GTO. You should not have any problems whatsoever. Not sure even why you'd think ATI would do a worse job than nV. The real showstopper are the integrated Intel graphix chips. If you get those, then you're pretty much limited to PopCap games (go Peggle!)

I've got one of those and CIV works just fine for me. Only the wonder movies and opening and victory movies are stuttering like hell, but I never watch these anymore...