my laptop won't run UT3 why?

hey. i bought a toshiba satellite a210 a couple of months back
bout ut3 and guess what? it doesnt' run well

i can get about 7fps on the lowest of low settings. i mean 640x480 res and everything

specs.....

amd turion x64 dual-core 1.8ghz
ati radeon HD2600 gfx (256mb dedicated)
2gig ddr2 ram
windows vista premium
260gig hard drive i think

all drivers to do with gaming i.e gfx processor etc are up to date. checked on dirveragent.com

now i think this meets the min spec asked for by ut3 by alot.

it even comes up before i go into ut3 that my specs don't meet the minimum requirements.

maybe my gfx card isnt supported. could anyone shed light on this and how i may rectify it

i can play cod4 on high, and most other games on full or at least high with a very good frame rate.

can anyone help please. i cant dual boot xp as there are no drivers supported for xp for my hardware. tryed it already (rather disappointed)

thanks in advance for helping.

cheers

 

ATI is world wide known as the "king" of crappy drivers....

And it has been this way since... hmmm... ever, I guess!

Just take a look at the new radeon HD3870 X2... theorically it should perform wayyy much better than a geforce 8800 Ultra... BUT, because of the total lack of descent drivers... it performs only on pair... and in many games even much slower than the geforce!!! It's really frustrating, I know that cause my brother did the BIG mystake of buying one...

So, even though your card has the "horse power" to run UT3 almost as good as a Geforce 8600m GT would... because of the total lack of driver support... it won't, period.

 

I'm sorry but your post is false information. There is no reason why the original poster's laptop is not capable of running UT3. It should be able to run it at high settings.

Also, as someone who owns both ATI and Nvidia machines, I have to say the ATI's drivers are much better. The problem with the 3870X2 is that it's Crossfire, and it does not scale with every game. It's not just a problem related to the ATI Crossfire technology - it's even worse with Nvidia's SLI.

OP - update your drivers:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=204425

See if that helps. Also check to see if you can do any Windows Update.

 

Are you using the mobile catalyst 8.2? Did you patch the game?

 

i'm use catalyst but am using it so it uses the settings of the game.

i installed the 1.2 patch if that is what your taking about but it didnt help

thanks for the help so far. i really appreciate it

 

It sounds like a DirectX issue to me (corrupt or missing a component), you might want to try reinstalling DX using the re-distributable http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...9A-5B72-447D-84F9-EE6407ED1A91&displaylang=en

It's not the graphics chip, and not the drivers (works fine on both the laptops below with HD2600 and X700 [clocked at 400/400], and doesn't even require ultra low settings).

If it's saying your specs don't meet, I have a feeling it's treating your CPU as a more generic proc and the 1.8GHZ like an old P4 / Athlon 2K.

 

Like Chaz said, that's bunk dude.

That was as old an issue as nVidia's poor image quality.

Now they're pretty much equal, if anything the driver situation switched there during the GF7/X1K era.

Now both are pretty much the same. both have issues, limiations and problems, but neither can be said to be universally better/worse.

And your example of the X2 doesn't take into account that the GX2 equally doesn't perform up to it's theoretical potential either, that's just the poor performance of multi-GPU scaling in general be it Xfire or SLi.

Seriously, Fanboi much?

 

ATI HD2600 should be on par with the 8600m GT, try checking your driver, reinstalling the game.

 

i have checked the driver reinstalled the game and installed that dx redistrib and its running exactly the same no change whatsoever. its really annoying

 

Are you on power saver?

 

it seems to be running better now lol. dunno what i did but i restarted theg ame again and voila. thinkit might have been the dx update that did it. thanks a bunch. only problem is i cant find any antialiasing settings or are they automatic?

 

You can only do those from the nvidia control panel.
But running the game at 5/5 details should help

 

aye i can do stuff fromt he catalyst control center. which is good. looking amazing now.!!! thanks a bunch guys

 

Yeah I'm sure the difference is noticeable, for you it was probably like my going from the X700 to the HD2600, hey I didn't know that surface was supposed to be all smooth, shiney and reflective, nice!

Glad to see something helped (probably the DX, that's what your symptoms sounded like to me) if you find some limits with the feature set check out the AtiTrayTools for a few more features (but be advised, could add minor instability for some system so be prepared to uninstall if you have issues, it caused some problems for 2 generations of ATT after I bought my Fujitsu).

 

i might check it out. thanks soo much for your help again. i've go a new found respect for the unreal engine

 

The Unreal 3 engine is awesome. Games like Bioshock, Timeshift,Black Site Area 51,they were all built on it.
And there`s more.That engine is awesome and runs great on today`s hardware.

 

Ahh timeshift is a really good game and looks great Yeah I love the UT3 engine, best engine so far.

 

Yeah... but Timeshift gets TOO repetitive, and boring thereafter..

 

True, true, though I haven´t played it that much yet. Though it reminds me a little of Half Life 2 best FPS game ever released.

 

Doesn`t it? That`s why I like Timeshift, it resembles Half Life 2 in some parts,but looks awesome like UT3.

 

Yeah, it does! But can't quite replicate Half Life though... nothing can!

 

I ain't a Fanboy of any brand/company... as I said before, I've already owned AMD, INTEL, NVIDIA, ATI... and even Via products (well, this one I regret...). And as you said, all of them are pretty much the same...

Except that:

1) Current AMD's cpus are fair away from the performance delivered by Intel,

2) Unfortunately, the same applys to ATI against Nvidia....

 

i'll agree that amd cpu's and gpu's dont QUITE match the intel / nvidia performance, but its not like an 8600m gt will get 40 fps in UT3 at 1280x800 high settings and the hd 2600 will get 7 in 640x480 low settings. come on. come ON. maybe 7 or 10 frames DIFFERENCE at the same image settings.

 

chaz, ati is not good at the moment. It is not false that nvidia has better for cheaper

 

There was a time when ATI and AMD were the best for gamers,but regretably,they lag behind a lot nowadays.
There might still be hope.

 

Nice try, you weren't talking performance, your were spouting about past driver issues, just like if I were to say that the reason nV gets higher benchmark scores in unrestricted games is because their image quality is known to be worse and they are known to cheat at games and even benchmarks (where they get caught more often).

Seriously, your post did nothing but spread old FUD, and did little to try and help the OP. Especially when it looks like it wasn't the drivers but instead a DX issue like I mentioned. So what would your next recommendation have been, for him to sell his computer and buy one like yours? And what's that... oh yeah.

In UT3 the HD2600 and GF8600 are evenly matched, so even the performance argument has little weight.

BTW, ATi cards outperforms nVidia's in 3Dmark03/05/06 so I guess they must be better cards, right? Don't see any nVidia cards in the Hall of Fame.

--

PS, not gonna bounce the thread for this; but this ARStechnica article seems to prove that nVidia drivers are just as buggy if not buggier than ATi's;
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...t-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html
Over 3 times as many error reports, and they don't sell 3 times as many GPUs as ATi and intel. So unless you have something more concrete, I'd say you've got things back to front there.

 

Take a 8800GT or 8800GTX against an ATI solution. Then you have competition, and that's really where the nVidia/ATI performance comparision should be made.

 

But Greg, why bother in a thread asking about a specific game on a specific laptop?

Seems pretty unrelated other than someone trying to pimp their own rigs.

That's like calling tech support and instead of them fixing your computer they suggest an upgrade to something else or chide you for chosing your 8800GT instead of the GF8800Ultra or waiting for the GTS-512.

 

This thread is going nowhere...obviously the ATI fanboys are gonna bash nVidia, and the nVidia fanboys are gonna bash ATI.

To steer this thread back onto topic, TS, only suggestion I have is make sure your laptop isn't running in energy consumption mode. I can't understand why you are only getting 7fps/lowest settings when that is a decent video card.

 

2800+ w/ATI 9800PR0/XT dominated at one time!

 

That's cause it was solved many posts ago, and pretty much closed off with "aye i can do stuff fromt he catalyst control center. which is good. looking amazing now.!!! thanks a bunch guys".