Laptop w/ Radeon Xpress 200

[Pause]

Alrighty, so here's the deal:

I have a laptop, it's running on some pretty decent hardware. AMD Turion, 1gb ddr400, wifi, etc. One problem.... the video card is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200. Now I'm trying to play a game called everquest2 right? I can run the game fairly well on a low graphics setting, but now and then it gets choppy as hell, then goes back to running smoothly for no reason at all. I figured maybe if I got better drivers for the video card it might fix the problem but noooooo, ati screwed me and they don't even make a new driver for that card. The only place I can get a driver for it is on the Gateway website, but it's the same driver the laptop came pre-installed with. I will never buy anything with an ATI product again because of their driver updates, or lack there of.

Anyway, my question is, does anyone have a tweak or any tips for what I can do to speed this laptop up?

P.S. I have directx 9.0c already, and all windows updates are current.

 

[mechBgon]

Welcome to the Forums I had a laptop with that onboard video chipset too. I think you may simply have your expectations set too high in the gaming department. From the game's system requirements FAQ:

What components should I use to build the "perfect" EQII machine?

The simple answer is to use the best components you can afford. Keep in mind that we've designed our game with the future in mind. It will take CPUs and video cards that aren't on the market yet to be able to play our game with all options cranked up to full. The idea is that as computers get faster and faster, our game will look better and better without needing an engine overhaul.

Driver updates don't make the underlying hardware inherently faster. What you might try, is looking in the computer's BIOS for an option to increase the amount of RAM that's accessible to the onboard video chip, so it has more "elbow room" to store texture data. Also, try reducing the game's resolution, and reducing the "eye candy" settings like texture detail.

 

[Pause]

Thanks for the info mechBgon. I will go through that stuff when I get home, but just so I have a heads up. What would that setting in the BIOS be called? I've seen graphics aperature size before on other BIOS's, but I was never really sure what it did.

 

[UMfanatic]

yes I have the same problem, I can play doom3 and oblivion with my laptop that has an M200, but quake 4 moves like it freezes with each step, high res games are not recommended with the M200

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Pause
Thanks for the info mechBgon. I will go through that stuff when I get home, but just so I have a heads up. What would that setting in the BIOS be called? I've seen graphics aperature size before on other BIOS's, but I was never really sure what it did.

If the setting is present, it would probably be referred to as something like "Shared Graphics Memory" or some such. You can also raise the graphics aperture size if it's listed, but that's not quite the same thing. Know how you can shop for video cards and they come with 128MB or 256MB or 512MB of onboard RAM? That's the analogous setting you want to look for, the one that lets the onboard GPU stash a bunch of textures and keep them ready.

This eats into the RAM that's available for the game and Windows, so it's a trade-off. After playing a game, open up Task Manager and look on the Performance tab to see what your peak RAM usage was. If it's up around 900-1000MB then a memory upgrade might help somewhat.

Bigger picture: you could buy or build your own desktop system, chuck in a decent video card in the $150-$300 range, and it would eat your laptop alive

 

[Pause]

I am currently buying the parts to build a new desktop but funds are kind of tight so I can only get like 1 part every 2 weeks. I got an evga 7950gt and an athlon x2 3800+ am2 for the ddr2 support so far. Anyway thanks for the info again, I never thought to play around in the BIOS on a pre-built system. Normally I only do that on systems I build, thanks again!