Inspiron 1501 w/ATI Radeon 1150 256mb video problem???

Why can I not play Call of duty 2? Even at the lowest settings it's to slow to play. I very rarely play games but I have played Call of duty before and really like the game. It ran very smooth with max settin on my older laptop (Inspiron 1050 w/64 mg video)

Here are the specs on the 1501.

Inspiron 1501, AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 processor, ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 with 256 MB, 2 gig, and Ram 120gig HDD.
I'm thinking of sending the damm thing back?

 

that ram is siphoned off the 2 gigs of system ram. therefore, you probably don't have enough bandwidth to make the game playable even at lowest settings.

 

What's funny, I tried playing the game in direct 7 mode au lieu of direct 9 and it is pretty smooth at the same graphic settings.
The the video setting (in control pannel) the UMA will not change to any other settings other than 16mb.
There is of course 16, 32, 64, 128, 256mb. But will not change.

 

Have you tried the BIOS? If the video ram taken is not updated automatically then there must be a setting somewhere to alter it. The 1150 should be able to take at least 128mb if not 256 or 512.

 

There's not settings in the bios I can see directly affecting the display.
If I look in the video adapter,it shows up as 512 mb????

 

Why is it that the game is so choppy with Direct 9 andsmooth with direct 7?

 

What card did you have before? I am going to guess that the card was physically more powerful and it could better process the graphics.

 

Both are laptops,
The old one has aATI Geforce 5200 64mb, my new laptop has a ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 256mb.
They both can only play the game with Direct 7 only, the 256mb doesn't seem any better. When I change to direct 9, forget about playing the game with either machine. Choppy!

 

The 5200 is a dedicated card and is faster then the IGP ATI Xpress 1150.

 

Yes but, Its 256mb and I have 2gig of ram. The old laptop has 1gig.

 

DirectX 7 and DirectX 9 are two different rendering modes; DX7 is old and basic - there are no fancy reflections, refractions, complex lighting effects, or features like that. DirectX 9 adds them and is in turn much more complex and therefore harder for the GPU to process.

Like all of the XBox 360 console ports, CoD2 is poorly coded/optimized for PC. It's a shame, really. So, run in DirectX 7 for best/most playable results.

 

I've just bought this notebook and I'm ready to send it back.
I'ts really not doing anyting more than my od notebook.
What to do........

 

It still bugs me that I cannot cange the UMA setting. It will only stay at 16mb.

 

The card is probably just not able to handle the graphics (it is an integrated card, afterall). Its better than the Intel GMA, but worse than pretty much any current dedicated video card. Also, don't worry about the amount of memory the video card uses, I believe that the card will take what it needs as it needs it, up to 256MB.

 

Thanks for the help everyone. I still think I'm going to retrne it and wait until the fall and see for something better.