This game is terribly optimized

[Waffen_PL]

I've just bought this game on steam - Theater of war 2 Africa and Kursk with all DLC's. I really regret I didn't check it before buying it. Luckly I didn't have money for Korea which i wanted too. I have Intel Core 2 Duo 2.10GHz, 4 GB RAM, Ati Mobility Radeon HD 4650 1GB, Windows 7 64bit. Yes, this computer is not Skynet but still... despite it's laptop it meets recommended sys. requirements but the game is completely unplayable. Cutting all graphic options only makes this game looks like crap but doesn't increase even one goddamn FPS. What the hell??  

[Schrullenhaft]

The TOW series is actually created by 1C Company out of Russia. Battlefront was highly involved with the TOW 1 release (which utilized OpenGL as the graphics API). With TOW 2 and later releases Battlefront had little input during development (to my knowledge) and they switched to the DirectX graphics API (which probably helped with some driver issues). The TOW games sold on Steam are sold by 1C Company or whatever their distribution arm may be. I'm not specifically aware if Battlefront gets any sort of 'percentage cut' paid to them for games sold on Steam (I suspect not, but do not know for certain).

I would expect SOME sort of improvement with reducing the graphics options within TOW 2, with resolution possibly being one of the bigger ones, along with disabling 'shadows'. Essentially selecting the 'Low' Object Detail setting should have helped a little. I'm not sure how much of a difference there may be in performance with the resolution set to 1024 x 768 60Hz compared to what you may be running natively on your laptop.

Admittedly the Mobility Radeon HD 4650 isn't very powerful, but it should do OK with the TOW 2 releases. I'm not sure what your expectation of performance is though. TOW has to draw a bit of 'horizon', which is significantly different from the way that FPS games may work/draw. You will get NOWHERE near the frame rate of many FPS titles due to what has to be drawn and textured on the screen. However below 30 FPS really isn't that bad with games such as the TOW series. How are you measuring performance, with FRAPS ?

Do you know what driver version you are using ? The 13.9 Catalysts are the latest drivers for your Radeon and Windows 7 64-bit. I do NOT know if these particular drivers (in the link) will work with your laptop or not. Some laptop manufacturers have unique hardware IDs that may not work with the drivers supplied by AMD. In this situation you could only use the drivers provided by the laptop manufacturer (or go through the process of modifying the INF files to support your particular video chip, which can be a bit risky). I'm not aware if there are any issues with the TOW 2 series and the 13.9 Catalysts. I'm running the 13.9 Catalysts with integrated Radeon graphics (Radeon HD 3200) and TOW 3 seems to be working fine.