Question for laptop gamers (or anyone who thinks they can help)

I'm currently using an HP laptop with a 1.8 ghz AMD Turion 64, 1 gig of ram, and a Radeon 200m. Now, i know that this certainly isn't the fastest rig, by any means, but i've become increasingly disappointed at its overall performance. I can barely play any 3D games on it. I get around 15 fps on Empires with all the client tweaks. I'm thinking that this might be because of my video card, but i'm not sure. Does anyone know anything that might help me? If i could somehow get Empires to run well (read: playable), it would make me so happy :-)

Heres a link to the specs for the video card. Its a strange one, i know: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_14603_14628^14631,00.html

 

Are you using the latest driver?

Did you try turning bloom off?

Did you try turning specular off?

Did you try downloading the unofficial patch that "fixed" the 2 sided models?

 

I'm using the latest Omega driver, forget which one.

Bloom is off

Specular is off

Didn't try the patch, but its bad even without a lot of vehs, players, or buildings.

 

Try forcing the game DirectX level to something lower

Also, did you just get that avatar? I don't remember seeing it when I posted.

 

I'm getting decent performance on high detail in 800x600 with similar specs + Ati x600 (no spec no bloom).

 

add -dxlevel 80
to your command line options for Empires.

You might also try -dxlevel 70, but I imagine that would be a bad idea.

 

Directx 7 isn't too bad.

 

He should probably leave it at his card's native DX version, TBH.

 

Well, that card is pretty weak. It only has a64 bit memory interface, compare that to 256-bit on my 7800GT.

Tune down all the quality settings in the driver options and set them on performance.

 

I've tried all those things except forcing a different directx. Personally, i dont see how that would make a difference because all the pretty, directx stuff is already disable in the settings.

 

Eh, Letuce, even G4 books have 64-bits.

 

"Videocard" is the keyword here, not "processor". There's a difference.

 

I am running on a laptop with a 32mb radeon (pretty crappy). The only reason I can run is because of a lower directx version

 

The processor is just fine, just a while ago, when I upgraded my BIOS, it set my CPU to run at 1.9GHz instead of the usual 2.53GHz, and I played empires with no noticable slow-downs... then of course I realized hl2 wasn't just bugging out with it's processor speed detection, and it really was set to run at 1.9GHz, so I went and fixed that.

You really should try lowering the DirectX level.

 

Ok, kind of a noob question. Where does the dx command go? I put it in the autoexe.cfg file but it didn't really give me the fps boost that i needed. Should it be somewhere else?

 

The launch parameters.

 

You mean the launch parameters.

 

Wow.

Start steam.

Right-click the empires thingy.

Yeah.

Command-line parameters.

 

No need for attitude. Do i want launch options? Because i read that putting things in the autoexe.cfg is basically the same.

 

It's basically not the same.

Command-line parameters (what some wierdo at Valve decided to call launch options) get passed to the program the moment it starts. They set the entire stage for the rest of execution. As far as I can see, the stuff in the autoexec file gets done after the game has gotten itself going a bit, so it's not as flexible anymore.

Moral of the story: The command line is more powerful.