Gaming Performance Questions
Phantomphreak
Locally - Right Here on Earth
I hope I'm posting this in the right forum 
I am a bit new at this, so please bare with me
I am running an 11-month-old Toshiba notebook (Satellite A70) with a 3.06 ghz P4 processor, 1.15 gigs of RAM (which I recently upgraded from 256 MB in an effort to drastically improve gaming performance) & a 128 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 video card.
I have purchased several games recently that do not function well or at all with my system. The first offender was Star Wars KOTOR, a 3 year old game! The issue was this: gameplay lagged so severely it was entirely unplayable. The framerate must have been about 3 fps. I guess the issue with this is that my card doesn't support Transform & Lighting (which seems strange seeing that this game pre-dates my card from what I've heard).
Anyway, after recovering from the shock of this discovery, I made an attempt to locate titles that don't require T&L (believe me, there aren't many) and stumbled on Fable: the Lost Chapters. It made no mention of T&L and the support website says my card is compatible. Now the game lags drastically unless the video settings are adjusted to the bare minimums. What gives?
I've tried running a clean boot to minimize interference from other programs and processes, but it doesn't seem to help much.
Anybody have any ideas on how to improve my performance? I was looking into upgrading the video card, but I've been told it's not possible in this model of notebook. Others have mentioned possibly having to replace the motherboard (an operation I'm definitely not ready for
). I am crossing my fingers hoping that I'm not just totally screwed when it comes to getting to play the vast majority of recent games.
Any clarification or advice anyone may have would be tremendously appreciated. Also, terribly sorry for the long-winded post. I just wanted to make sure I got everything in there.
I am a bit new at this, so please bare with me
I am running an 11-month-old Toshiba notebook (Satellite A70) with a 3.06 ghz P4 processor, 1.15 gigs of RAM (which I recently upgraded from 256 MB in an effort to drastically improve gaming performance) & a 128 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 video card.
I have purchased several games recently that do not function well or at all with my system. The first offender was Star Wars KOTOR, a 3 year old game! The issue was this: gameplay lagged so severely it was entirely unplayable. The framerate must have been about 3 fps. I guess the issue with this is that my card doesn't support Transform & Lighting (which seems strange seeing that this game pre-dates my card from what I've heard).
Anyway, after recovering from the shock of this discovery, I made an attempt to locate titles that don't require T&L (believe me, there aren't many) and stumbled on Fable: the Lost Chapters. It made no mention of T&L and the support website says my card is compatible. Now the game lags drastically unless the video settings are adjusted to the bare minimums. What gives?
I've tried running a clean boot to minimize interference from other programs and processes, but it doesn't seem to help much.
Anybody have any ideas on how to improve my performance? I was looking into upgrading the video card, but I've been told it's not possible in this model of notebook. Others have mentioned possibly having to replace the motherboard (an operation I'm definitely not ready for
). I am crossing my fingers hoping that I'm not just totally screwed when it comes to getting to play the vast majority of recent games.Any clarification or advice anyone may have would be tremendously appreciated. Also, terribly sorry for the long-winded post. I just wanted to make sure I got everything in there.
0
Comments
I visited ATI's website and checked out there available driver updates; unfortunately, none of them are compatible with the Mobility Radeon 9000. Additionally, I visited Toshiba's website and they do not appear to have any drivers more recent than what I currently have installed. I logged a ticket with ATI in an attempt to locate the most recent drivers, so now I suppose I just have to play the waiting game *sigh* until they get back to me on that.
From the research I've done in the past few hours, it seems this may be the least supported card in history, so we'll see what happens.