Any ways to improve graphics performance of laptop outside of upgrading hardware

All, I have a laptop that has no graphics card, just a 2520m with HD 3000 graphics. It plays starcraft 2 and LoL fairly well, I was just wondering if there is anything I can short of upgrading the hardware of the machine to improve gaming performance?

 

If you have less than 4GB RAM, it might benefit a bit from increasing the RAM to at least 4GB.

Also, if you have a mechanical HDD, you can improve loading times, boot/shutdown time by upgrading to SSD.

Other than that, all you can really do to improve is try to tweak the graphics settings for your games, use FXAA instead of MSAA, for example, reduce your display resolution below your laptop's native res if necessary. And make sure you have set up your laptop's power settings for maximum performance on A/C power.

 

if you do the utmost you could to that laptop, as in tweaks or installing as much ram as you can, you'd be lucky to get 5% more gaming performance.

 

And make sure you have up-to-date drivers for your GPU!

 

ram and ssd will help speed things up but wont do anything for graphics. the only way around that is a dedicated graphics card which your lappy wont take so the only option is a new lappy.

actually there was a large page on here about an external graphics card but i have no idea how that works and if it will work with lappys with only intergrated graphics like your HD3000

 

Thanks for the advice all. I've changed the power settings and updated the drivers. Next I'll go through optimizing the graphics settings in the games. We'll see if we get an improvement! Also, I have 6gb ram so I should be good on that score.

 

HD3000 is one of the better baselines for an eGPU. It's more a matter of connectivity. If the system has an ExpressCard port, an eGPU would be worth looking into.

 

^thats the one. found it and its over 1000 pages so happy reading michilius

http://forum.notebookreview.com/e-gpu-external-graphics-discussion/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html

 

faster ram speeds does really really good to the iGPU.

 

Great reading, something to consider. Thanks!

 

I myself am running an external graphics card off my macbook pro (can check my signature). It really gives an insane boost even to laptops such as mine which has a pretty mediocre dual core i5. I can play games like borderlands 2, battlefield 3, metro 2033, and planet side 2 at not maxxed out settings, but ones comparable or better than those super high end gaming laptops; all with my small macbook pro and a box. If you want a small bit of performance difference, my macbook stock plays single player bf3 in ultra 1080p rez at around 2fps while my egpu can bring it up to a very constant 30fps (granted multiplayer is a different story, but I can still hit 60fps at 1080p with most settings on low).

The price is high but not as much as buying a new laptop, and can really increase the life of your laptop. And because it's a desktop graphics card, you can upgrade it whenever to increase the performance (though you'll run into cpu and bandwidth issues the higher end card you go with).

 

Do you think more RAM would improve gaming performance?

 

4gb of ram is the minimum you should have for gaming, but above that is fine. If you have 4gb, upgrading to 8gb is probably the cheapest upgrade you could do and would take away any bottleneck (unless you were running battlefield 3, photoshop, and 30 chrome tabs at the same time).

 

If you spend any more money on that laptop trying to improve performance, you'd be throwing good money after bad. You'd have to get at least 20% improvement to notice anything has changed and that's never going to happen, nor will you be satisfied with 20% more talk. I'll put it to you like this, if you were in a car doing 100 MPH and then went up to 120 MPH you'd barely know there was difference without looking at the speedo.

If you can't really tell the difference, even though it is a bit better, will you be happy?

 

I spent hours and hours in that thread but eventually gave up and got a large laptop with a decent card.

 

If you want phyical upgrades, RAM is about it... otherwise you can just do some routine maintenance things to get beter performance gaming. Keeping your computer cool always helps, I always used a cooling pad.

Also, drivers are important. Try finding the best drivers for your system in terms of performance and heat. Good luck!!! Its a tricky beast

And obviously, in game settings are a biggie. Resolution, AA, filtering, etc. all play a big part.

 

double post

 

Sounds like a major improvement over stock. Just wanted to say it's quite up to par with the 7970m or 680m though. Either of those cards will handle BF3 and Metro on max settings with no problem. My NP9150 runs Metro at 45 fps on max settings with aa, BF3 runs even better.