Tested on both ION and Intel GMA 3150

San Andreas is a notable game in the Grand Theft Auto series because it is the first to feature a black protagonist and the first to have a few cities which you’ll have to travel to and fro via a variety of methods including airplanes or cars. The game starts off slow, with you trying to blend in back to the hood you came from. Once the leading faction of gangs in San Andreas, after you, CJ, come back from the East coast, you find your gang reduced to a rut. And that’s where you come in… to try to fix things.

The game is very enjoyable, but if you recently played GTA IV, you might find that San Andreas lacks polish and realism. Shooting is also less refined as is other things like crash damage and definitely graphics. But the storyline of how you get back in the hood is quite an interesting one, and then there’s the vastness of the game both in terms of space and storyline. It will keep you on your computer for quite a while.

The sad thing is that the game does not work well on anything other than Fusion processors. On the Nvidia ION 2, the frame rates were great but with one major problem – it won’t load into the main menu on the ION processor, but it will do so if you used the GMA processor instead. However, the latter means frame rates of 10 or so, with signficant slow downs. Definitely not playable. The former, on the other hand, is extremely playable, even if you stretch it all the way up to its maximum res at 1440×900. How do I know? Well, I realised that if you plugged in an external monitor, you can successfully load San Andreas and play it. There’s just no logical explanation for this!

If you know of any fix, please do contact us.

Like

Great storyline

Lengthy game

One of the more unique GTAs

Dislike

Has compatibility issues with ION, isn’t playable on GMAs

Verdict

It’s fun, but you’ll need to get past the compatibility issues with an ION or just do the right thing and get an AMD-powered netbook.

Gameplay:  Great! Not as good as GTA IV, but still up there.

Graphics: A bit dated, but extremely smooth on the ION (1400×900, 25 fps)

Work needed to get game to play: No known fix for ION 2 netbooks other than plugging in an external monitor.

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6 Responses to GTA: San Andreas on a netbook

  1. trina says:

    I played gta san andreas in Gma 3150 the only problem is that is umplayable if it have win7.
    But run in win xp.

  2. iqwan says:

    this is best broo

  3. Haris says:

    Try set everything to lowest in gta:sa… 640X480 16bit? sure, looks bad, but try speeding in a car. FPS will be much more faster when using XP + GTA:SA Thunderstorm weather cheat + msconfig startup + services.msc + regedit mod + gamebooster. At least, its playable, not like NFS Most Wanted (not the 2012 one), so much lag.
    Spec:
    No-name china netbook
    GMA3150
    Atom N455 1.6 GHz
    1333Mhz 1gb DDR3
    Drivers: DriverPacks (drp.su)

  4. JHAY says:

    how., ?.

    is this really works in my netbook.,?

    uuhhhm., there is mark on my netbook. INTEL , ATOM INSIDE , and widows 7 Starter.,..
    please tell me., how? , im so bored,…

  5. Vinie Hawk says:

    I can play GTA SA at my netbook with Intel N2600 GMA 3600 1240X600 got a bit lag, but work really fine, with minimum setting

  6. darren says:

    10 fps and this is still playable for me.
    I guess I got used to it
    47% completion.

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