Did I get a processor not powerful enough for gaming?

Last night when attempting to play the demo of Dark Messiah on my PC, I experienced lots of slow down and skipping. I lowered the resolution to 1440x900 and removed AA and AF. Still some of slowdown. I could have lowered other things, but didn't.

I checked out System Requirements Lab today and was told that everything met the requirements for both minimum and reccomended setting, except for my CPU Speed. The CPU itself passed on both. But it's speed failed on both. It said that both cores working together came to about a speed of 2.39 GHz, and that was under even the minimum requirements.

Even though I got a Core2Duo, did I get one not powerful enough to handle more recent games and future games?

I can play HL2 completely maxed out on native resolution and all I see is some slight clipping here and there. But I didn't think that I'd get much worse performace from a game built on the same engine. Even Sin Episodes required some leveling down, and I feel HL2 looks better than that game.

I'm just a little worried that I overestimated the power of my CPU and expected it to be a powerful gaming machine. I maybe should have spent the extra $138 to upgrade to the the 2.0 Ghz C2D.

Are laptop CPUs upgradeable? I imagine they are. I'm just going to have to spend a lot more money than if I just upgraded to begin with. I won't worry about that sort of thing now. I'll just have to play it at much lower settings if I do purchase the game. Or if I purchase any other future game.

 

The Core 2 Duo is plenty powerful, don't worry about that. Those "CPU tests" that are in games are useless, because they only measure clockspeed. That may have been a relevant test in the days of the Pentium 4, but today it is not. It's the processor itself that matters, and not the clockspeed.

The reason you are getting slowdowns is probably because you only have 1GB of RAM. 2GB is ideal for the latest games, really. You can tell if you are out of RAM if the hard disk activity light is blinking or always on while playing the game. It shouldn't be doing anything.

Try lowering the resolution in that game and see if it helps at all.

 

I'm with what the great Chaz said!

 

Thanks. I lowered the model and texture detail to medium, set the AA and AF to 2x and put it on simple reflections. It runs a lot better and still looks great.

I checked HL2 on System Requirements Lab and it said I didn't meet the recommended CPU speed for that game either, yet it plays great on my PC completely maxed out.

I do plan to upgrade the RAM in the future. But games still look good at lowered settings. If I collect any money for Christmas I may purchase the RAM. I can sell the ones I have on eBay or just keep them around for whatever reason.

 

is your ram 1 stick?

get 2 gigs of dual channel ram and you should be set :-X

 

Don't expect too much improvement from additional RAM, you may still have to lower the settings to get satisfactory performance. If you do get more RAM, please let us know if it makes a difference.

 

No. It's 2 sticks of 512MB. Unfortunately there was no option to have 1 stick. To upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM would have cost me $185. I can find 2 gigs of RAM at newegg for about $200. By the time I actually replace them it could be less. So I saw it as not the best deal to upgrade. On top of that I could probably sell the 1 gig of RAM I have now and make some money back, making it much less expensive than simply upgrading on their site.

 

Like Chaz said, don't pay attention to those "your cpu doesn't meet requirements" messages.. thats because the software doesn't recognize that you have a very modern/efficient processor...all it sees is the frequency it runs at and doesn't think thats high enough.. it's wrong. Your processor isn't slowing you down at all.

Like others said before, your ram is whats holding you back. Once you have 2 gigs of ram, your machine will be accessing your hard disk a lot less while gaming which means much smoother, consistant experience.

 

Okay, well, that would be your problem.

Disable the AA and you'll get a huge performance boost.

 

Actually 2 sticks of ram at 1 gig is good enough, it's dual channel. If you had 1 stick it wouldn't be, but since it's dual channel, you're good to go. Just don't get something like BF2 or Oblivion and get alot of mods :-X

Of course having alot of 512 meg sticks of ram is also bad too, which draws back on the 15% gain you get with dual channel... it's always best to have a couple good 1 gig or 2 gig stick of ram... but yes, having it dual channle is always good...

 

As mentioned above, it's not your CPU holding back performance. C2D's are more than fast enough to handle games.

It's a combination of your settings and RAM--especially the AA.

 

I took off AA and it didn't really allow me to up any of the other settings without slowdown. I don't get good enough performance unless it's down to 1440x900 with medium models, medium textures, low shader detail and simple reflections.

I didn't do a clean install of Windows when I received my Dell. I just got rid of some of the bloatware manually. Could some of the extra unwanted processes be slowing anything down? I've only had it for 2 days. I just felt like using it right away rather than doing maintenance work.

I may do a clean install soon anyway, unless I could get rid of most of the bloatware without doing that.

 

I would recommend doing a reformat via the guide in the Dell forum - it's best to start off fresh with a Dell notebook. Even if you uninstall all the bloatware, there's still going to be some leftover stuff.

 

Yes, when I did a clean install, I was able to do what I wanted

You could, obviously, use regedit and get rid of what you want if you are a pro, but it's doubtful.

Err, forget what I just said. Just reformat.

 

I agree. Dell PCs come with a lot of bloatware and running a clean OS will be nice.

I pulled these system requirements for the game:
RECOMMENDED

3 GHz CPU
1 GB RAM
256mb dx9 video card
6+GB HDD Space

MINIMUM

2.2 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
128mb video card
6+GB HDD Space

2 GB of RAM may be what you need to run the game smoothly--but also dropping the AA and leaving the settings where they were would likely help some.

 

Another thing to do to drop background processes is to disable them on bootup.
To do this go to Start>Run>msconfig(type this in)
This will bring up a screen. On the far right should be a tab named "startup"
Click this tab, and click "disable all" in the bottom right hand corner. Then go back and manually click on the things you do want to keep running when your computer boots up. Things to leave checked are Antivirus programs, pop-up blockers, NHC, etc. That should dramatically increase bootup speed, and overall speed as well.