Far Cry at 800x600 freezes regularly on Mobility Radeon 9200

[Paktu]

My friend just installed Far Cry on his laptop, which is an HP with a Mobilitiy Radeon 9200. Even with minimum detail settings and at the lowest resolution, about every 3 minutes the game will freeze for anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds. I've tried shutting down and uninstalling all the programs running in the background, patching to v1.3, as well as changing the PCI latency, to no available. What else should I try?

 

[Paktu]

Anyone?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sure that it's not the laptop CPU heating up, and then going into thermal-throttling mode? Might want to download/install ThrottleWatch to check that. Either that, or ... are you using PunkBuster (an online gaming anti-cheating tool)? There are some reports of similar, regularly-repeatable "pauses", while playing games online that use Punkbuster; most often seen with XP and AMD64 systems with AGP video, although it has been seen in other combinations (although W2K appears to be immune from it). (I suspect some sort of wierd interaction between the AGP GART driver, and XP's lazy-allocation of PTEs, and PunkBuster tries to, at regular intervals, memory-map the entire game's process address space, to scan for "cheat" software's code-strings. Given the memory requirements of most games, this could easily result in a brief pause. However, 5-10 seconds seems a bit too long for that, I suspect thermal-throttling, or possibly a HD issue, those are also known to cause "freezes", but generally only when overheating, or when accessing the same sector, if it is going bad.

 

[Paktu]

It has a Pentium 4 in it so it certainly could be a heat issue.

 

[wakawaka]

Isn't Far Cry way too much for that 9200 to handle?!?

 

[Paktu]

It is a lot I admit but I have it at 800x600 at minimum settings. I would think a 9200 would be able to do that.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Paktu
It is a lot I admit but I have it at 800x600 at minimum settings. I would think a 9200 would be able to do that.

Critical!

Do you have patch v1.3?

it is very buggy without it and runs MUCH better with

oops . . . . i see you DO have patch v1.3 😱

how much ram does his notebook have? 512-1024 is recommended

Some mobile Radeons are 'cut-down' versions of the desktop variety and often the drivers are never updated . . . .

the FC box says:

Supported Video Cards . . .
ATI Radeon 8500/9000 families ( . . . 9500-9800xt recommended . . . )
laptop models of the listed cards are not fully supported

maybe that's 'why' 😉

 

[jiffylube1024]

If you have anything less than 512MB of RAM consider yourself lucky - this game is a RAM hog and needs lots of system memory to load the large levels without much HD swapping (which would be further magnified by a slow laptop Hard Drive).

Second, a 9200 is really inadequate for Far Cry. It does meet the bare minimum I think (the 9200 supports directx 8.1) although Far Cry runs best with a DX 9.0 card or above.

 

[Paktu]

The laptop has 512mb of RAM. I may try installing the VXG drivers on it later to see if that helps.