Warcraft III does not use anything Direct3D9 related. It uses the Direct3D7 fixed function pipeline, possibly with some 8.1 extensions.
I was pointing this out since you were surprised, even nowadays CPU power may still be related to model detail one way or another for existing, working hardware.
For the record, this was also the case before the first 3D accelerator add-on cards for PC desktops were released. Early 3D polygon-based PC games (such as
Alpha Waves) use CPU power only, and sometimes
not even the FPU.
I believe the
NEC PowerVR series 1 chipsets from 1996-1997 (meaning the PCX-1 and
PCX-2 chipsets / Matrox m3D add-on card to be among the first 3D accelerator hardware available for PC desktops.
When
hardware T&L was first implemented into PC video cards in 1999, I remember there was much hype about the fact the freed CPU time would eventually be used for AI enhancement. Yeah, right.
That chipset is also very strange... It references both Pentium 4 and DDR/DDR2. The last Pentium 4 released was 11 years ago in 2006, back when Warcraft III was still a pretty modern game. Both DDR and DDR2 have long been obsoleted by DDR3 and now DDR4 to the point that such old memory is extremely expensive. The specific "Pentium-M" you reference sounds like one released in 2002. Seeing how Intel 3D acceleration capabilities were as good as non existent back then (as opposed to just sucking a bit now) it is surprising the game can work at all. To be honest the fact the computer still works with such hardware is a miracle or down to not being used much as all the hardware certainly has past end of life long ago.
My laptop is a NEC Versa S950 from 2005. That should explain a lot of things.
During the 2000s, both NEC and Western Digital produced tough beasts. From my personal experience, hardware failure over time may be due to an aging power supply, and/or to unexpected power variations (if not lightning!).
Intel hardware works in unexpected ways. The software-only T&L part in some integrated chipsets is obviously a sore point. Not mentioning the OpenGL hardware accelerated support being limited to v1.4 only.
Yet, the Intel i915GM integrated chipset passes the most complex
3DMark 2001 SE Direct3D tests iirc. But on anything else using pixel shaders, one may experience BSODs on startup, because of this unusual graphics rendering pipeline. XashXT comes to mind here (note: it works with Xash3D, though).
For OpenGL rendering requiring full support for 1.5 /2.x, one can only use a third-party MESA 3D OpenGL dll, which will sadly do everything in software (meaning: slooooooow!). Fortunately, the Quake engines up to and including Quake 3 do not require OpenGL v2 support. Lucky me.
All the games up to the early 2000s
I am interested in, work on my laptop. This includes Warcraft 3 which was first designed in 1998.
When it was first released in 2002, Warcraft 3 was less demanding than the other games released that year, because the game engine has its roots in the 20th century. I was even able to kind of play it on a PII 350 Mhz with a
nVIDIA RIVA TNT2 M64 video card, using Windows 2000. I do not recommend trying to run the game on a S3 Virge DX. At all.
