Best video setting for my Laptop? Help?

huntercross14

Chieftain
Joined
Jul 8, 2012
Messages
3
Hi, could anyone tell me the important video settings that i need to increase because my current video setting options are mostly on low and the game graphic is kinda bad, i only want to increase the key bits or it might lag. The highest that i want to increase is to medium. thanks

my laptop specs are:
Intel i5, 2.30GHZ, 8GB RAM. Intel HD 3000

So i just started playing Civ5 and my video settings by default are:
Leader Scene Quality = Minimum
Overlay Detail = Low
Shadow Quality = low
Fog of War Quality = Minimum
Terrain Detail Level = low
Terrain Tessellation level = low
Terrain Shadow Quality = off
Water Quality = low
Texture Quality = low

High detail strategic view = untick
Anti-Aliasing = off

I did some minor changes to Fog of war to medium and Terrain Detail to medium, so far it doesnt lag. Water Quality i want to set it to low because i play mostly on land.
Also can someone explain what is overlay detail, terrain tessellation and anti-aliasing?? thanks.
 
With that setup I think you should be able to get away with medium settings. Intel HD 3000 is integrated graphics, yes...but on an i5 or i7, they get decent performance (the minimum was for the previous generation of Core i3 and up, which did not use HD 3000). What you should do is gradually increase the graphics settings, then run the game and see how it goes. If the game gets slow or has issues, scale back. Leave anti-aliasing off. You can mess around with the other settings.
 
You might want to try to increase texture quality but leave everything else on low/off. That should make the largest difference and I think that's what you want: Improving the picture quality while taking the least hit on the already suffering hardware, right?
 
With that setup I think you should be able to get away with medium settings. Intel HD 3000 is integrated graphics, yes...but on an i5 or i7, they get decent performance (the minimum was for the previous generation of Core i3 and up, which did not use HD 3000).

Sorry, but "slightly better than crappy" is still crappy :p

Nevertheless, there might be some settings where performance is mostly CPU dependent, the approach you suggested is useful for finding these.
 
I simply speak from experience running the game on HD 3000 graphics...it is competent enough to run the game (even the link you provided shows a 100% improvement from the previous generation of Intel HD). It won't give great performance, but even with higher graphics settings, I find the game is acceptable.

In this case, it really seems to be a case of deciding between nice visuals and low framerate...so I suggested gradually testing the graphics settings to find a nice medium. I still suggest that.
 
thanks for the answer anyway now i have bought a new alienware laptop and playing in high sets cheers
 
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