Yes, you can offload some work to the CPU that is really the job of graphics cards. But for RTW what you want when you upgrade is DirectX 9 support as a minimum.

The other big big big big issue is you are running with 32MB video RAM. You will have game crashes, slowdowns, and/or instability. CA expected you to have 64MB for texture storage, minimum. And that is the way they optimized their graphics. Just because it plays for a while does not mean that all is OK... it is not. It just means that a combination of game settings and game circumstances have not caused a crash (try shooting fire arrows & burning buildings with unit size 80; many machines with 32MB will crash). This onset can be delayed a bit sometimes by increasing AGP aperture size to 128 in BIOS, but even this will not save a 32MB card from what is often a CTD. You need 64MB, minimum, to fully play the game... as a minimum. And CA was correct.

So no, I suspect the M7 card is 16MB or 32MB, and DirectX 7. You game will probably run choppy, glitchy, and occasionally crash.

RTW really needs DirectX 9 and 128MB of video RAM to run well. You can castrate the quality settings, and use small unit sizes, and improve performance, or enable higher settings and start to get laggy if you use a DX8 or 8.1 card and only 64MB RAM.

The dell site says they have DX9 cards, with 128MB RAM... I don't know if they work in your exact model, though. Even the Mobility Radeon 9000 (DX 8.1/128MB RAM) is very weak.

You can find some ATI data here.

Here are the Official Activision (CA) minimum RTW requirements:

Quoted from Activision minimum requirements: