Huge problems with my new notebook

[Arrad]

Hey guys,

today my new notebook arrived and I thought it might be a good idea to install CMSF and play around with it for a bit. Now I'm enountering serious problem. For one, the whole game menue is laggy. It takes years until the option I selected is opened and confirmed. Additionally the whole letters are somewhat blurry, plus, when I play a scenario th game is incredibly laggy and the ground is basically just plain black, though I can see the units and houses on it.

This one is the notebook I'm using : http://www.notebooklieferant.com/packard-bell-easynote-ts11hr-122gege.html

EDIT: I just realised that right now, everytime I'm starting a scenario, the game freezes during the briefing and whenever I try to left or right click, CMSF just stops working and I crash back to the desktop.

Any help is really appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Arrad

[tdogg]

I bet it's a driver issue, I don't read German, but it looks like the hardware is good on ur computer.

I had a similar problem with my lappi which uses an nvidia 310m, I had to try 6 different drivers. I finally found one that is sorta playable, but still has problems....blurry text, poor textures and low draw distansce. My old laptop from 2007 actually performed better with the cmx2 engine, unfortunately it crashed.

[Arrad]

Damnit! Being the overexcited doofus I am, I was so eager to play the game on my laptop, I totally skipped the first patch -.-

Problem solved, sorry for bothering you guys.

[Schrullenhaft]

The "black tiles" is usually a good indicator that the 1.10 patch has not been applied (which you figured out). I'm surprised that it made a performance difference though.

The video chip in your laptop is the GeForce GT 540(M). This is an "Optimus"-based video chip that allows the "integrated" video to run most of the time and when you need 3D/video performance, the Nvidia chip runs the graphics. With the Theatre of War series there is an issue where the Optimus drivers don't recognize that there is a need for 3D performance (because the initial executable isn't actually running the 3D code) and thus leave the "integrated" video to attempt to run the game. CMSF doesn't work in this way, so I don't think that was what was happening here, but it could have been a possibility (at least the Optimus technology not handing off to the Nvidia chip).

[tdogg]

Could this happen with an nvidia 310m card, I get weak performance with cmsf? It does have a dual integrated / 3d card setup, not sure if it is optimus based but will check.

I suspected this was the case weeks ago and tried to uninstall the integrated dirver to sort of disable it, but I'm not sure it helped as the performance is still weak.

[Schrullenhaft]

tdogg - If you have both an Intel integrated video along with the Nvidia GeForce GT 310M, then it sounds like your system may be using Optimus.

According to web sources, the GeForce GT 310M isn't a very great video performer, but that is also comparing it against all of the modern games that are out there now. A Tomshardware list has the GT 310M in the approximate performance class of video cards like the GeForce 4600, FX 5700, 8300, 8400 and the Radeon 9600 Pro and X600. So it will do OK, but not really great. There are still a number of graphical elements in the game that can trip up even fairly powerful video cards.

As for whether the game is running on the Intel integrated video or the Nvidia GT 310M, you may want to check out this video about Optimus software features. You'll want to enable the system tray icon to notify you of the status of the GPU. With CMSF being a full-screen game I'm not absolutely sure how well this will work (since you will have to minimize CMSF in order to open up the tray utility). Hopefully you can manage the 'profiles' within the Nvidia control panel for 3D Settings.