Half-life 2 Settings for Integrated Video.

Megadeth4168

A buddy of mine gave me his laptop when he got a new one. It's a Dell Inspiron 1150.
It has 2.8Ghz CPU and 512Mb RAM

The big downside is that it has an Integrated Graphics... Intell 82852/82855 GM.
I have a copy of Half-Life 2 Deathmatch that I put on the laptop to let someone use for an upcoming LAN party..... I like to have a couple spare computers in case someone can't bring their own.

Anyway, I forced the launch option to all the lowest details on everything, I update the graphics drivers, I de-fragmented the hard drive, cleared out temp files and shut down all services I didn't need while playing....

After All of that the game still runs very sluggish when I'm in outdoor areas... In areas like hallways it runs much smoother.

I'm not fooling myself... I don't expect stellar performance from an integrated card, I'm just wondering if anyone has run HL2 on an integrated Graphics with acceptable performance.

Are there any other settings I can force that will help run the game smoothly?

ally_uk

Yeah whack in a geforce 8

Megadeth4168

ally_uk wrote:

Yeah whack in a geforce 8

Would be nice but this is a laptop... My options are somewhat limited at the moment. Honestly, if I can't play it smoothly on the laptop it won't hurt my feelings too much, so I'm not really willing to spend much money to get it to work either.

sprkymrk

Can you control the amount of memory allocated to the video in the bios? If so, then for less than $100 you could throw a GB of RAM in and allocate the maximum allowed (usually 64MB- 128MB) to just the video.

FunkOdyssey

IMHO, attempting to play any 3d game produced in the last couple years with integrated graphics is an exercise in futility. Its like bringing an old buick to an autocross event -- sure you could technically do it, but it will make your life miserable and everyone will laugh at you. :P

Megadeth4168

From what I can see my Integrated Graphics can not be set in BIOS and is always at 64Mb.

Like I said, if I can't really do it, then it won't hurt my feelings but it would be nice to have the extra computer with the game on it.

I was reading up a bit and found that some people with low end cards (not integrated form what I gathered) had a decent performance increase by forcing the game to use DirectX 7 instead of 9.

In the launch options of the game I can do this, I won't actually be able to try until Thursday though... I left my laptop at a friends house and won't be heading that way until then.

Lee H

What about installing Vista and taking advantage of "Ready Boost"

Wack in a formatted pen drive and there ya have extra RAM

Dunno if the game will run on Vista as i dont play it


Lee H

JDMurray

HL2 is a very graphics-intensive game. The integrated video subsystems in most laptops are not designed to give the kind of performance that HL2 needs to be played smoothly with (at least) a continuous 30 FPS. Integrated video also relies more heavily on the CPU than an independent GPU does, so you want to turn off anything that continually eats CPU cycles and memory (A/V scanners, software firewall, etc.).

The original Half-life Deathmatch will run just fine on your laptop, but not there's probably nothing you can do in the BIOS or in software to make HL2 run better than you already have. Try Googling for "laptop gaming performance" and see if you can find any esoteric tweaks for your system that may help.

Megadeth4168

JDMurray wrote:

HL2 is a very graphics-intensive game. The integrated video subsystems in most laptops are not designed to give the kind of performance that HL2 needs to be played smoothly with (at least) a continuous 30 FPS. Integrated video also relies more heavily on the CPU than an independent GPU does, so you want to turn off anything that continually eats CPU cycles and memory (A/V scanners, software firewall, etc.).

The original Half-life Deathmatch will run just fine on your laptop, but not there's probably nothing you can do in the BIOS or in software to make HL2 run better than you already have. Try Googling for "laptop gaming performance" and see if you can find any esoteric tweaks for your system that may help.

I will see what the search comes up with.... My friends and I play the original Half Life deathmatch all the time.. I know that works... The down side to that is we all have the old version that uses the WON network which no longer exists... So I've been having trouble creating an Internet server... So moving to Half Life 2 Deathmatch for $10 seemed like a good idea... Works great on my 2 desktop systems at home but like I said... It is sluggish on the laptop... I will also try setting it to DX7 instead of the default DX9 and see if that helps.