I have a new HP pavilion notebook pc running windows XP home edition and has an AMD Athlon XP processor at 1.05 GHz, 448 MB of RAM, a 24x CD-RW/DVD combo drive, and an ATI Radeon IGP 320m graphics card. I've purchased a Grand Theft Auto:Vice City PC game and my PC meets all the recommended requirements, but when I play the game in 1024x768 it runs slow even in 800x600. Is there any way I can make the game run faster in the highest resolution possible without purchasing any new hardware?

I dont know a great deal about the ATI Radeon IGP graphics card, but i think that the most likely problem is to do with that. Even if you graphics card meets the absolute minimum requirements of a game, the actual architecture of the graphics card and its graphics capability is a complete different thing. Right now the best in the Radeon mobile range is the, ATI Radeon mobility 9200, and the ATI Radeon mobility 9700.

But as i dont know much about the 'IGP Radeon' i cant comment a lot on it, the rest of ure system specs seem to look ok.

I don't know much about gaming at all but I know that I had to look into whether my ATi graphics card was suitable when I wanted to install Colin McRae Rally 2 or 3 years ago.

ATi generally make quite "compatible" graphics cards as far as I know - if the game supports ATi Rage 128 chipsets or Radeon chipsets, then that 64Mb on-board graphics chip ought to be OK.

There are a variety of display settings that can be altered but I'm not the best person to advise on them. Go into Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced and have a fiddle with the options in there.

I would also recommend obtaining the latest update for DirectX. You can do this by going to www.microsoft.com/directx or by running Windows Update.

Let us know how you get on and, whilst your off doing that, hopefully someone who's into gaming will offer their advice as well

Hi there, I have GTA vice city and it's one of those games that seriously understates it's minimum requirements in order to sell more copies. I have a Athlon 3000+ and it still gets choppy on full detail / max resolution when things get busy on screen.

Unfortunately you only just exceed the minimum requirements of a 800MHZ CPU allthough you should be able to get the game running a bit faster...

First off you need to make sure that your on-board graphics card supports Direct X 9.00 Texture Compression. If it dosne't then its you memory thats the problem, you'll need to about 768 - 1024 MB of RAM to run the game smoothly. Also you NEED to update all your Direct X, video and sound card drivers (especially if your using EAX). Finally turn the resolution up to max but set on a 16-bit colour depth (eg. 1024 X 768 X 16) and then start to mess about with the advanced graphics options. Try turning things like shadows off and lowering the decals level.

You should be able to find a happy medium between visual quality and playability.

Hope this helps...

G

i registered on this forum only to tell about about my problem. i have a hp ze4315, and im not much of a gamer also, but when i do, i have noticed my refresh rate is amazingly faster if i have the power hooked up. its almost unplayable when not plugged in

To answer two points:

Xenix, your machine is woefully inadequate for a game of that calibre (no offence intended). Most notebooks are and unless you had a Radeon 9700 mobile GFX processor in there I would expect it to be unplayable as you describe. You can try turning down the detail, shadow and lighting settings in the game options for Vice City but it won't help that much I feel

harofreak, the reason it is faster when it is plugged in is that most laptopts will drop the speed of the cpu and take other performance limiting measures when running on battery only. This is doen to conserve battery life.

Basically the long and short of it is that laptops where never meant for gaming. As for HP, I had a massive go at there tech support the other week about a similar problem within a HP nx9005.

The problem lies in the architecture of the chipset. If they recomend a amount of graphic memory, then the game / appilcation is usually compatable with most cards, but if it specifies a type of card (i.e ATi Radeon 9700) then you need that specific type of card to get the best results and there is a real battle within the manufactures of the cards.

The battle is between ATi and NVidia, some games are supported by NVidia, others by ATi, its like the graphic card wars of AMD versus Intel (even though Intel landed the Apple Mac G5 deal ).

I can't rember for certian, but I believe that Rock Star games use ATi, but there is a significant difference between PCI cards and laptop cards. The main difference is size, but then cooling of the chipset has a major impact, as the PCI can be cooled directly by a fan and the surrounding air, the laptop can't and only has the fan, therefore hindering its usability and graphic capability.

Hope this just don't just carry on what everyone else is saying, lol


Regards
_________
Meckanix

Dear Friends,
I have Intel P4 3GHz (ht)
1.5gb of Ram
Intel GMA 3000
i have installed Vice City and San Andreas
they both run slow.. In the game where objects(as Building,people,cars) are LESS the game runs fast but as Objects increase the game get slower

I have all drivers and everything but the game still runs slow
Can some one help

First of all, I'm assuming you're running those two games on a laptop.

To begin with, San Andreas is quite a lot more demanding than Vice City. So if Vice City is already lagging (runs slow) San Andreas will most probably run slow as well. Your specs so far looks up to Vice City's requirements but I'm somewhat skeptical with the Intel GMA 3000.

The Intel GMA 3000 is generally a somewhat weak integrated graphics card. Then again, most integrated graphics card are not meant for gaming.

Perhaps you can try running Vice City with a lower resolution? Have you checked the amount of memory allocated for your graphics card? Are you on any power saving scheme that could perhaps limit your laptop's performance?