Abysmal performance on my Acer 4315...

I don't know why, but it can barely run a thing. Even the original Half Life lags a lot. Now, it has got a Celeron at 1.7ghz and the X3100, so it's far from being a powerhouse. But even the Eee could run HL at reasonable framrates when you run at 900mhz.


BIOS says the video card has got only 8 mb of memory, Windows says it has got over 200mb.

What should I do? I have Vista Ultimate with SP1 on the thing, the latest drivers from Intel and the laptop is clean, no old drivers, HD was formatted recently, no bloatware.

You'd think that it should at least be able to play the original Half Life well. I don't intend to play any demanding games on the thing, but some light gaming would be nice every now and then.

 

your video has 0 memory..it shares the system memory... i know i have the same basic system,,, best thing i can recommend is to downgrade to XP...

a T7300 would be a nice speed increase.. but even a T5450 would be noticable...

 

can you switch the video over to DVMT in the Bios ?

just another one of my thoughts

Phil

 

You can't do a darned thing in the BIOS. And I tried gaming in XP too, no luck there. Maybe Ill have to live with it, its not my main laptop but my little brother wants to borrow it, but what is the point if he cant play anything on it?

 

x3100 actually has 8mb "dedicated" memory, my BIOS report the same

 

my bad... i thought it was ALL shared.... shows how much i know my own machine

 

Not that it means anything, as 8mb is nothing nowadays.

 

I have one acer 4315 also and trust me, it's not that bad. I recommend you to downgrade it to windows XP (IF you still want Vista you can set keep it and set dual boot). But you will gain a lot of performance in windows XP, and furthermore you should go to www.intel.com and upgrade your video driver to the newest one (15.9 for VIsta and 14.34 for XP), it's very important because the driver that come with the laptop is very old.
I can run HL1 at 60FPS and HL2 at 24 FPS with my acer 4315
And I can not set the DVMT and ram share in the bios of 4315 also, seem like Acer has locked it. BY the way, can anyone tell me what the maximum amount of ram that the 4315 support (some guys told me that it support only 1,5 GB of ram maximum)

 

I have the same experience with HL, CS Source etc on my 4315. Most games are quite playable, just gotta turn down some detail levels a bit. I'm running 1x2GB in mine. I tried 2x2GB, boots fine but locks up at the windows login screen (running XP x64).

 

i found an answer that might help you...

go into the display properties,,, click the settings tab,, click ADVANCED button,,, click the INTEL GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR DRIVER for MOBILE,,, click GRAPHICS PROPERTIES,,,, then click 3D SETTINGS,,, scroll down the list to the option for DRIVER MEMORY FOOTPRINT,,,, click on the setting to the right of the title.. it probably says NORMAL... click on it and choose HIGH

now click APPLY, OK, APPLY, and what ever esle to get out of that set of screens

not sure if it's required,,, but a reboot should force the new settings to take affect