KotoR2 for PC is extremely laggish

[LabSpeciman]

I have a brand new laptop and with the lowest but best performing settings for gaphics on KotoR2 it is still unplayable...

 

im using an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 and a 3.33GHz Pentium IV with 382MB of RAM... i doubt the RAM would pose a huge issue but i can't seem to figure out what the problem is... i've tried installing Catalyst 5.5 but the installation stops and an error message pops up saying "cannot find INF file. Install standard VGA driver to you Display Adaptor."

 

can anyone help me with this?

[Naso]

You might need to get laptop specific drivers. www.laptopvideo2go.com if i remember right, might have some. After that, in the swkotor2 config file file you need to add "Disable Vertext Buffer Objects = 1" in the graphics section.

[JamieKirby]

and the fact that Kotor II was NOT designed to run on laptops might have something to do with it, but thats just me.

[Naso]

You mean the fact that it's ****ty coding..... It won't run all that well, but I think I've seen people post that they've gotten it to work on that card. Might wanna try a forum search.

[dufflover]

All that crap on stuff being not designed to run on laptops is BS.

If the cards are similar enough (and with most ATI Mobility and nVidia GeForce Go's they are) it'll run.

I play on a 32mb GeForce4 440 Go - crapper than the Mobility Radeon 9000. Sounds like another ATI related problem.

[zeroFantasy]

382 MB of RAM isn't enough for KOTOR! o.O

and ATI suck. I can't wait to get enough money for a GeForce

[dufflover]

382 MB of RAM isn't enough for KOTOR! o.O

and ATI suck. I can't wait to get enough money for a GeForce

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm on 256mb LOL

[Azuth]

OpenGL Version=1.3.4204 WinXP Release

 

There is your problem.

 

From the troubleshootiing guide:

 

OpenGL Compatibility

To run Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II, your video card driver must have OpenGL 1.4 compatible drivers. OpenGL is a graphics API that was originally developed for professional workstations. It is now a standard API (Application Programming Interface) for 3D hardware acceleration, utilized in several current 3D games for the PC. Make sure you have the latest video drivers for your video card.

 

You need to find updated drivers that will work for your computer. That is the only way to fix the lagging. Unfortunatly ATI is not known for there great Open GL compatibility especially with laptops.

 

Azuth

[Mark Havel]

With the lastest release of 5.6 Catalyst drivers, Ati is supposed to support laptop video cards now. You should try them. Anyway, having 512 MB of RAM makes the game fare more confortable.

 

The video card is the most critical component of a PC regarding game performance. The Radeon 9000 is a low end video card and you should not expect having the best performances in any game. Since most of the laptop don't have high end video cards (they tend to be high power consumming and making a big lot of heat), this kind of computers are not the most suitable for games. The programmation of the game engine is in this case not the most responsible for the bad performances of the game.

[Marka Ragnos]

actually, the 9000 is a low-end graphics card, face it. even if it is among the top-tiered notebooks graphics cards.

[Marka Ragnos]

well, can you tell me how many pixel pipelines and vertex pipelines it has? and how fast it's memory and core is at?

 

edit: nevermind, I already found out. it's an old card, released in 2002, it doesn't even support dx9 and has only 4 pixel pipelines and ungodly slow core and memory. not to mention it's the lowest radeon series regardless of the fact it may be faster than a radeon 9000.

[swaaye]

and ATI suck. I can't wait to get enough money for a GeForce

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You have no idea what you are talking about.

 

9000 user:

The game seems to run a bit choppier than KOTOR1 on my 9600, but it runs fine. My 9700 PRO runs KOTOR2 fantastic. Just be sure that you have the newest driver, or the driver that they "tested" the game (ha, did they really test the game) with.

 

You have two options as a mobility user. Either Omega drivers (which I question as they are just hacked Catalyst drivers), or the official ATI Catalyst drivers. I'd go with ATI personally. To run the Catalysts on a mobility chip you must first mod them with a simple utility. http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/

 

Seriously I'd also check out ATITool and see what you can overclock it to. You may be surprised. I've been overclocking laptops for 2 years now. (9000,9600, and now a GF6800 Go).

 

A Radeon 9000 GPU (RV250/M9) is a Radeon 8500 minus a texture unit per pipeline, so it's a 4x1. It also has just one vertex unit to 8500's two. It's a great little chip though. If you have 64MB or more of video RAM it's a 128-bit bus. I played KOTOR1 thru on one, and it was a 9000 32MB 64-bit bus on a Vaio notebook.

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/fairway/r9000pro/

http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/chipcomp/?vie...er=Order&cname=

 

R9000 IGP/9100IGP (RS300) is a lot different. It is a 2x1 architecture with no vertex shader. Vertex shading is done on the CPU (not a terrible thing with the powerful CPU most of these systems have). It's still one of the fastest IGPs though, second only to ATI's Xpress 200 chipset. If you can get recent drivers on it the game should run, albeit pretty slowly due to the 2x1 nature and it using system RAM.

http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/ati/rs300/

http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/chipcomp/?vie...er=Order&cname=

 

The 3xxIGPs are not gonna cut it though. They are actually based on Radeon 7000 and are way too slow and lack far too many features.