Acer AS 1410 - Play Battlefield 2?

Anyone who has the Acer Aspire 1410 been able to play Battlefield 2? The game installed fine. Any time I go to start it, the screen flashes a few times like it's loading, then just dumps back to desktop. Has anyone successfully installed and played Battlefield 2 on this machine? Thanks.

 

Maybe BF2 doesn't support intels integrated graphics? But I did see a youtube video of someone running Doom 3 on this machine, so it should alteast load

have you patched to the most recent BF2? (1.5 i think) try updating the integrated graphics too

 

BF2 is an older game dating back to mid-2005 , so I am sure that the latest Intel GMA cores (including the 4500MHD etc) would support it quite well.

Have you installed the latest BF2 patch that just came out a month or so ago as mentioned above? It is version 1.5 and added official widescreen, 2GB+ RAM, full Vista support etc:
http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/bf2...1/battlefield-2-update-v1-50-available.aspx##

Also could it be performing a CD check for copy protection purposes?

 

the IGP is fine (will play at native res, textures, dynamic lighting & lighting at medium), but i think the processor might not be able to support it. 1.4GHz is way too low for most games.

 

BF2's minimum specs call for a 1.7Ghz Athlon 64, Sempron, P4, or Celeron. Keep in mind those are mid-2005 era CPUs. A modern Core 2/Conroe-derived processor such as the SU3500 is likely to run circles over a comparably clocked processor from as 4.5 years ago. For example, a 1.8Ghz single core Celeron-L I have in a test machine at work runs circles around the Celeron D 2.8 sitting next to it.

OP, let us know if you manage to get it going. I still have a copy of BF2 sittong on my shelf I got cheap but never got around to playing. Might have to dust it off one of these days...

 

Intel GS45's X 4500MHD runs at 320mhz compared to GM45's 500mhz. Games might run slower and single core Core 2 wont help much.

 

oo ya i forgot that the 1410 has a GS45. then i don't think the 1410 can run BF2.

 

My point was that it runs fine on my Lenovo with Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz with GMA 4500MHD but not on the 1410 with Core 2 Solo @ 1.4GHz with GMA 4500MHD.

I am an avid BF2 fan and had the 1.5 patch day of release. I'm not sure what the restriction is, but I've tried everything and so far no luck.

BTW, patch 1.5 eliminates the need for a DVD or CD check.

Only thing I can think of is that BF2 checks the actual CPU speed and quits if it doesn't meet the spec. But it gives no error message or log file to check. Some have done a hardware mod to overclock to 1.7GHz, but I'm not that saavy or have the tools to do the mod.

 

Hey,
I have the 1410, but I installed Windows 7 RC1 (took out Vista). Battlefield 2 boots up and plays online with administrator priveleges. But it has very poor scaling, for example:

1366x768 @ 15FPS
Texture Filtering: Low/Off
AA: Off
Everything else: high

1024x768 @ 15FPS
Same as above

1024x768 @ 25FPS
Textures: Medium
View Distance: 100%

800x600 @ 30FPS
Same as above

I have the following:
SU3500
3GB PC2-5200
4500MHD (Power saving OFF, High memory usage)
Win7 RC1 32-bit

I'm guessing that it's either poor Win7 drivers, or I need to replace my DDR2 with DDR3; read up the Inquirer article (yes, it's a tabloid, but atleast some things are right), they find out that Battlefield 2 doesn't need a high-clocked CPU, but it needs a high memory clock.

Link: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047792/battlefield-you-won-pc

EDIT: I ran CPU-Z (by Cupid) and got this information:
Core Speed: 1.4 to 1.6 GHz ( :O )
Multiplier: 8x
Rated FSB: 800MHz
L2 cache: 3MB (pretty good!)
Type: DDR2
Channels: Dual
Size: ~3GB
DRAM Frequency: 332.5MHz
JEDEC Frequency: 200MHz | 266MHz | 333MHz

It seems that the memory is contributing to the bottleneck, does anyone know if it has the entire ICH8 chipset? Because then it might be upgradeable to DDR3 RAM.

EDIT2: I found this post in the fourm: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5268276#post5268276

 

@ctown.myth
I suggest that you read Timeline Tweaks(see sig), get a matched pair of 2x2GB 800MHz DDR2(1410/1810t physically don't support DDR3) and try different drivers(Vista/Win7).

 

Yeah, I was thinking of getting 6400 RAM, but about the drivers - do you mean older drivers or installing Vista drivers on 7? AFAIK Win7 uses a different display method than Vista (WDDM 1 vs 1.1). Also since Intel's drivers are WHQL certified, shouldn't they deliver at least the same performance as the previous ones?
Sorry for the overload in questions, but this is the first time I'm dealing with Intel GMAs (or even a notebook).

 

The Vista drivers have some kind of dual channel boost mode which the Win7 drivers are lacking, but not all games will benefit. Source games for example run better with Win7 drivers. I use Win7 drivers in Vista so I think it should also be possible to use Vista drivers in Win7. Here is a 3D Mark comparison of Vista vs Win7 drivers on my dual channel setup:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5390840&postcount=197

 

Hmm I'll have to check that out, thanks! Unfortunately I won't able to get the RAM until mostly around the new year, I'm half-broke from Uni.

 

I am running 2 x 2GB DDR2 800 using Windows 7 Home Premium. Maybe I need to try other drivers.

@ctown.myth - what drivers are you using, is it 32bit or 64bit Win7? How do you set GPU high memory usage? GPU-Z reports 64MB RAM. I know it shares system memory, but is there a way to force it higher?

 

I'm using the stock 600 DDR2 3GB that came in the Canadian version. For the settings:
1. Right click on desktop, go to 'Graphics Properties', 'Display Settings' on the right, hit the 'Power settings' button, and choose 'Disable Power Savings', click 'OK'
2. Right click on desktop, go to 'Graphics Properties', 3D Settings, scroll down till you see 'Driver Memory Footprint', set to 'High'.
I haven't seen any missing textures so I'm guessing that BF2 still has enough memory left over to run well.
In GPUZ it shows up as GM45, a PCI bus (!), 64MB of DDR2 RAM and a GPU clock of 475MHz. I'm using 32-bit Win7 and 32-bit drivers. I'll get to testing the Vista drivers over the weekend, too busy right now.

EDIT: I don't think that the 64MB that GPUZ reports is the shared memory, I'm pretty sure that I read someplace else that the 4500MHD has some of it's own dedicated memory; but I keep hearing either 64MB or 128MB. For example if you run DxDiag (Run -> dxdiag) it shows up as 1300MB of memory. You also might want to check out some interesting tidbit here: T500 with intel gma 4500mhd, increase system video memory

 

Hmmm. I tried this both in 64-bit and 32-bit Windows 7 and Battlefield 2 WILL NOT START. I tried WinXP compatability mode, running as administrator, Vista and 7 drivers. Nothing. I even tried getting rid of the .bik files to start and still it dumps back to desktop.

I have patched to latest version 1.5 from the getgo if that matters?

 

@ctown.myth
Did you identify the power saving settings as the reason for BF2 not to run?

The power saving settings have no impact on performance. The memory footprint setting is for OpenGL games only. 4500MHD dynamically takes as much memory as it needs to run a game. GPUZ can't itself properly identify features so it reports something that has been programmed into the GPUZ, which is wrong in this case. The 4500MHD has no dedicated memory.

 

Strange i have read lots of time that it has 64mb of dedicate memory, Even the Acer website says the 4500mhd has 64mb of dedicated memory.

 

That's misleading. I suppose that it's just the minimum reserved memory. But even that minimum is taken from the system RAM. There is no additional RAM chip on board.

 

I believe I found the culprit. Previously I installed BF2, then Special Forces, then Patch 1.5. It didn't work.

Well, I uninstalled and reinstalled BF2, then Patch 1.41, then Patch 1.5, and ignored Special Forces altogether. It seems patch 1.4 or 1.41 is required although I thought 1.5 was cumulative. If you try to patch with 1.5 over a vanilla BF2 it says the 1.5 patch is older version than the one installed on the computer ??? Oh well, as long as it works.

Now I'll have to toy with drivers, etc. Wish I could overclock a bit. That would really help.

 

4500mhd does have 64mb dedicated memory, (and as my sig shows, it can up to 1.7GB of shared memory)

i had such problems once with other games. try deleting the Battlefield 2 folder in the Documents folder. And also install DirectX to the latest version (i think is August 2009)

 

Off topic, but my definition of dedicated memory is "a physically separate memory that is connected to the GPU for graphics only". When the BIOS grabs some system RAM to reserve it for the GPU it doesn't make it dedicated memory imo.

 

I just tested the Vista32 drivers, and it shows no significant gain versus the 7-32 drivers. The game still horribly lags with a longer view distance and slows down to the exact same crawl in the exact same places.

 

I've played it a bit, and it runs well with details on low, distance at maximum, even on Wake Island. For some reason though, my ping sucks when using the ethernet (>100) but drops to reasonable levels when on Wi-Fi (<50). I don't understand that.

I don't plan on it as my main rig for playing BF2, but occasionally I get the chance to play and it's nice to be able to jump in for 20-30 minutes.

 

Can you play at the native resolution? (1366x768) You can set '+widescreen 1' in your shortcut path in you desktop shortcut. If you can't what resolution do you play at?

 

I played at 1024x576. 800x600 ran decently, but wanted widescreen. With 1.5 patch you don't need to set the option, all widescreen resolutions are available in-game.