very low FPS on my labtop

I got a new labtop recently heres the specs




im geting FPS of around 4-8 any ideas to make it better, besides changing to XP

Have you tried updating your video card drivers? With Vista still being new, many of the drivers do not work well with all games. Although that does not show your specific card so i cant say if thats causing your problem or not.

what video card u got?

the video drivers are up to date. its an ATI 1150 express video card. which is more than capable of running the game. Ive already tried the sound tricks they dont work.

I've tried to do some research on that video card but unfortunately, nothing interesting came out, although it looks like it's shared video memory. If that's the case then it explains the low fps you are getting, although 4-8 still seems a bit low. I would have expected something like 15-20fps

Yeah its a shared card, and tijo your right, he should be getting 15-20 fps, not 4-8, but like i said, with Vista drivers who knows. Other then that, everything else on your system should run fine, since you said you tried the sound switches.

i am running vista on my notebook with only a gig of ram, but it has a x1600 256mB Vista PR 4.3
GW runs fine with UAC enabled and with only 1 gig of system ram

Noticed you have 1.5 gigs of ram,
Try taking out the 512 stick and see what your results are.
Check your page file size make it static at 2 gig 2048
Make sure you have the latest drivers for you video card
i can't recall atm where device manager is in vista so just type it in the search box. See if you have any piece of hardware not installed
Run vista in classic theme
Does your computer make any noises besides the fan? like is your hard drive dying
How fragmented is your hard drive


Does it run fine in window mode?

I numbered them to be easier to answer back.
1.same either way
2.page file is at 2560 min and 4096 max
3.already made sure the drivers were the latest release
4.the device manager is in the same place as XP's but everything is fine there
5.still same
6.labtop is fine, plus its brand new not that it means much lol
7. isnt fragmented at all.
8. window mode in town and outside of towns are the same 6 FPS same as full mode.

though my pings are around 556ms also. Its just weird

I use an HP Dv8315 which has the ATI express 200m video chipset in it and get over 50 fps all teh time. You did mot say what your video settings were at but I can bet that is where your problems lie. On a laptop you will have to sacrafice some video candy to get decent framerates. Which means turning the settings down til you start to see the rates come up to where they should be at. Due to Vista beign brand new, drivers will be hard to come by so that may be a dead end. Just go into GW's video settings and turn them down, ok you will lose a lot of detail but that is how i did it and i get great rates on mine.

Mega Mouse

well mega i have tried that also and thats what makes it all strange.

Well, your x1600 is MUCH MUCH more powerful than his integrated video. That's going to make a much larger difference in framerates than RAM ever will. It seems like most people are seeing a general 10% - 25% performance hit running games on Vista as opposed to XP. Turning off the Aero Glass theme is a good idea...that's a huge resource hog. As was mentioned, it is possible that ATI's Vista driver for your particular video device isn't very mature in the D3D area yet, in which case there may not be much you can do but wait for a better driver.

[quote=dex]Well, your x1600 is MUCH MUCH more powerful than his integrated video
Asus z96js cost me a little less then a grand after i assembled it.

Click on the Start menu and type dxdiag within the search text box ,there are several tests you can run within the application for dx.

I was going to suggest running the game at different resolutions but you stated windows mode doesn't change the issue

" well mega i have tried that also and thats what makes it all strange." what is strange?


Have you tired another dx game?
How are you connecting to gw ... do you have a router, are you on wireless?



http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/v...d-vista32.html

If I was in this situation the first thing I would check out would be what's running that could possibly be hogging system resources ... cause it doesn't seem like hardware is the real problem.

I assume you have been watching like Task Manager or something and making sure you don't have too many background processes running? What antivirus/firewall are you running?

I hate to say it, folks, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's pretty likely that hardware is exactly the problem. Take a look at these benches:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6339&page=9

Now, these were taken using the desktop version of the chipset (incl. the desktop version of the same integrated video), a faster CPU, and more system RAM dedicated to video memory (256MB). For all intents and purposes the hardware used in this test should be faster than what the OP has in his laptop. As you can see, in most games this configuration was barely able to attain 10-15fps in games at 1024x768. Compound on that the fact that this is the mobile version of the hardware, he's running Vista, and he's possibly running at a the display's native resolution (likely higher than 1024x768), and I'd say you have a pretty good explanation of the framerates he's seeing.

Manitoba, I'm really sorry to say it this way, but I don't think your laptop's video hardware is up to the challenge. Have you tried turning the game settings all the way down and running at 800x600 resolution?

i was running it at 1024x768. i dropped it down to 800x600 it increased my FPS to 11-14 now but still a tad to low.

Looks like dex nailed the issue

I'm affraid you won't be able to get much higher than that. Like Dex pointed out, the problem is your video card and maybe some bad vista drivers too. If better drivers come out, and you can lower your video settings more than they already are then you might go up to 20fps but don't expect anything higher than that.

I also believe Dex has hit the nail on the head on a few issues. I neglected to note that I am running Windows XP media center edition on my laptop which is not a system hog like Vista is. Also I have 1024 megs of system ram, an AMD turation 2800+ cpu, the ATI 200m video chipset with 128 megs of ram. I can and do run GW at my notebooks native settings for its monitor (1400x900) with frame rates hovering in the range of between 45 and 65 depending on my connection, The screen is a 17" widescreen so thats one reason i turn down a lot of settings which do give me the framerates i want. Also for a connection, when at work (I work offshore) I have Cingular with a serria wireless access card. With this card depending on the signal strength I get those previously mentioned frame rates, but when my signal is low i usualy get less than 30.
Thats enough of my rant but like I said Dex has hit it on the nail, Vista is a system hog, does not play well with most games due to its needs, and with the lack of good drivers I realy do not see it getting better in the near future. My opinion of Vista "wait til it matures and all teh manufactures have worked the bugs out that prevent us from enjoying our games like we want to".


Mega Mouse

thats exactly what i was thinkin too that its mainly due to vista. to bad its a rent to own labtop or else itd be XP on it lol.

this is a well known problem between GW and windows vista.
try disabling antialiasing and let me know if it works