Civ4 on laptop, is radeon 9000 good enough?

Hi,

I try to play Civ4 on my Dell D600 computer. It has a ATI mobility radeon 9000 graphic card (with only 32mb).

The movies in the beginning of the game play well, but when I start a new game (in a new world etc) the game works so slow that it takes about 10 seconds just to move a bit in the landscape!

I know that radeon 9000 isnt a very powerful graphic card, but shouldnt it work with Civ4??

I've downloaded my drivers from dell because I didnt find appropriate drivers on ati.com (found only drivers for newer graphic cards)

The D600 was built as a Corporate Notebook about 3 years ago, it was not designed to take high end games such as current 3D games. Some will work, but not anything like adequately.

The on board graphics are weak by todays standard and you only have 32mb onboard. In theory it *could* run, but with 32mb its goijng to crawl as you saw...

The other aspect is that laptop came with only 256mb RAM, you need 512Mb to play Civ IV satisfactorily with XP.

Someone on Planet Earth will be running it on that setup - as always - but even if you made it go, you would have increasing performance problems - worse than now - as the game develops and new patches come out with additional features.

Nice laptop, still great value for standard home use, but not for Civ IV & other 3D games in general

Regards
Zy

Thanks Zydor for good answer. In my "defence" I've upgraded to the "huge" amount of 512mb

But does it matter if I use 1400x(dont remember the number) or 1024x7.. as my desktop screen resolution? or will the came always be run in a window if the resolution in the game is smaller than my destop resolution?

I think I have to realize that my graphic card isnt compatible with such developed 3d games. Pity to buy a new laptop only in order to get this game to work, because I'm very satisfied with the computer...

You could check with dell - but I am fairly sure you cant fit a graphics card in that one.
EDIT: watch out for enthusiastic Sales etc - need to verify heat issues with someone else other than the Sales guy if Dell say one can be fitted)

Re screen resolution - its always a good idea to set your screen res to its native resolution, and the vertical refresh to 60Hz ( the same refresh as the res inside the game). Two main reasons being

The way that LCDs deal with interpolating between its native resolution, and the resolution inside the game, particularly older LCDs. It ends up sometimes having problems, and has to work hard to doit (sometimes you see blurring on older LCDs, likely this aspect causes it.

The second is the vertical refresh - nearly all games default to a 60Hz vertical refresh, if your base refresh is different, the card again has more work to do.

With higher spec machines you dont notice the difference as the inherent power copes easily, but on lower spec machines you can many times see a difference.

All these things that reduce the work your graphics have to do to work, all add up, and on some tip the balance and it works - for now- later maybe not when more work is put on the beast after another enhancement.

Keep your eye on the board - particularly Neon Deon's posts - he is good at squeezing the last drop out of the hardware you have. Dont forget that reducing the load on main memory by not running any background services etc etc, greatly helps those with underspec machines as the main RAM has more room to try and make up for low video spec

regards
Zy

I would like to add that you can't know if Civ 4 works on ANY computer.

My rig is way above minimum specs but Civ still lags. Some people with roughly equal rigs have very different gamplay experience.