bare minimum

[Randomness]

whats the bare minimum to run PSU without lag, assuming graphics is turned down all the way?

[VanHalen]

I run PSU on a Intel Chipset 910/915 128MB, 512MB RAM, intel processor M 1.7 mhz(or ghz im not sure). You can run it at framskip 1 with compressed graphics and low end with the post effects on but you will get some lag with the post effects off no problems. Also for some reason I guess my eyes adjusted to it but I recently switched to frameskip 2 and left the post effects on. It runs exactly the same as with post effects off on frameskip 1 and not much of a difference in character movements.

[Randomness]

Well, the laptop wasn't really meant for games...

Wonder if I can set frameskip to 5 or something, lol...

[VanHalen]

lol Mine isn't really either I was almost praying that it would work. Now the expansion scares me a little It would take some kind of miracle to get it to work on my laptop.

[Randomness]

Mine only has a 64 MB card...

I only want it to work because of other people's demands on computer time. The only OTHER computer I could put it on would need an external hard drive-its out of memory. But it would work a lot better.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Randomness on 2007-03-07 15:30 ]</font>

[Randomness]

Still slow at frameskip 3, compressed, post-effects off, and all detail at low... what else is left to reduce?

[DurakkenX]

you could always try to switch hardware to CPU if you have a good CPU >.> that would free up your gfx card a little

[Randomness]

That helps a bit, still want to minimize more if possible, just so I can maybe up resolution.

[Randomness]

IS there anything else to reduce?

Does fullscreen use less graphics power than window mode?

[Jinu_San]

I was told by someone that window mode does use up more memorie or something.

[Blitzkommando]

Running in windowed mode requires the computer to be able to process everything going on on the desktop as well as the game, while playing the game in fullscreen puts the desktop into the background. Generally it doesn't matter much but on an integrated graphics chipset it can potentially make a rather large difference, especially with the absolute shit that Intel has to offer in integrated (although the new X3000 they have is not too terribly bad for integrated, but still terrible). AMD and nVidia provide much better quality for integrated although the performance is still bad, it's generally playable on older games at lower resolutions. The main reason Intel provides rather lackluster video performance is because they intend integrated graphics to be used in business or light computing environments. It saves companies money but doesn't provide much of anything to an end user, especially if they wish to watch high quality movies or play 3D games.

For reference, the AMD integrated X1150 and X200 are based on the X300 chipset which is a decent low-end budget chipset, albeit three generations old come this year. The Nvidia 6150 chipset (What is it now, 7000? 7050? I know the recently renamed it for some reason or another) is also a decent onboard chipset, again for a low-end budget chipset. The problem these chipsets have sometimes is that they tend to overheat as companies often don't even bother to install a heatsink to them yet they reach temperatures in the 140-150F range (and possibly higher in a poorly ventilated case and area).

As for the amount of memory dedicated to the onboard graphics you can change the amount through the BIOS. Generally with newer chipsets up to 256MB may be selected depending on the amount of system memory installed (Usually has to be 1GB installed at least to enable 256) all the way down to 16MB, and sometimes 8MB. Generally this is best used for the frame buffer, but frankly at 640x480 the frame buffer isn't all that large and 128MB is usually overkill. Just keep in mind that however much memory you select to dedicate to graphics, you can't use for the rest of the system. So, if you have 512MB of system memory and dedicate 128MB to graphics you'll end up with 384MB to be usable by Windows and any programs running in Windows. In the case of PSU, it can take up just about that much leaving the rest of the programs on the computer to go into swap file (virutal memory) on the harddrive that is very slow and can halt the system up.

Also, just for reference, the last 1-2MHz processor released for the desktop market was way back in the 1980s. Even the 386 was common to see at 33MHz back in the early 1990s. The Pentium I (usually referred to as the Pentium or Pentium MMX when they added MMX scripting) was fairly common to see at 100MHz which would outperform the older 486 processors at 133MHz. By the time the Pentium II rolled along processors were all the way up to over 450MHz and with the Pentium III and Athlon processors hit over 1GHz. Mobile processors, like the Turion and Turion X2 by AMD, and the Pentium M, Celeron M, Core Solo, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo by Intel tend to be clocked slower than their desktop counterparts but still provide comparable processing power as the architecture is more efficient. (a bit of trivia: the Pentium M architecture was based on the Pentium III and the Pentium M architecture that was developed by the Israeli Intel team lead to the development of the Core 2 Duo architecture) If you were able to run a, say, Core 2 Duo T7600 at 2.93GHz (like the desktop X6800) it should provide similar performance, if not better, than the desktop processor running at the same speed. That's just not practical in a mobile environment though as it would get too hot and require far too much power.

[Randomness]

Didnt quite need the history lesson...

Fullscreen w/o v-sync helped a bit. Still slow with anything else around. Couldn't find any options to change allocation to integrated graphics.
Anything else I should check to speed it up?

[SStrikerR]

any files on your laptop you dont need? delete them so you compy doesn't have to waste time making sure it stays where it is,( making sure it doesn't disappear in a way, or making sure it is saved.)