Help a PC gaming noob PC game better

[Malacite]

I'm not sure there's much you can do, that's the thing - Laptop's are extremely limited as far as upgrades go, and in all honesty you could probably get a decent desktop for far less than it would cost to optimize your laptop.

Apart from tweaking your in-game settings and updating drivers I really don't think you have that many options. We're not trying to be a jerks here, just giving an honest assessment (you're the one who called 360/PS3 owners idiots tho)

[Armando]

They're reasonably priced and have decent specs at the time you buy them but the way PC gaming works is that your cutting-edge hardware becomes unable to run games at max specs released 6 months after you buy it, and everything else goes down 1 rung on the ladder respectively. All PC gaming hardware is only reasonably useful for maybe 2-3 years from the time you purchase it before it needs to be upgraded (or you can't run the latest and greatest games at anything faster than a slideshow).

A problem easily solved by not playing everything at max specs. Considering the big backlog of older games BBQ always seems to have, I'd argue he could go 5 years with a good gaming laptop if he wanted to. He probably doesn't, but I'm just saying.

As for making the most of your current hardware, you should try to track down low-poly model packs and low quality, phongless texture packs. There's a couple of those floating around for TF2, you could probably find some for the other games. I wouldn't get my hopes up on Portal 2 though, even with TF2 looking like ass you can only squeeze like 20-30 FPS out of it with that sort of hardware.

[Aeni]

A problem easily solved by not playing everything at max specs. Considering the big backlog of older games BBQ always seems to have, I'd argue he could go 5 years with a good gaming laptop if he wanted to. He probably doesn't, but I'm just saying.

As for making the most of your current hardware, you should try to track down low-poly model packs and low quality, phongless texture packs. There's a couple of those floating around for TF2, you could probably find some for the other games. I wouldn't get my hopes up on Portal 2 though, even with TF2 looking like ass you can only squeeze like 20-30 FPS out of it with that sort of hardware.

Armando hit the nail on the head. As I said earlier, I suspected BBQ just needed something to run many of the "classic" titles and not care so much to get 300 fps in Skyrim with photorealistic visuals. Laptops are a pain in the rear, but at least they're not nearly as bad as they were 10 years ago. I remember people throwing everything but the garbage can at their laptops to make it even run FFXI at all ...

[Icemage]

That's fine, but as I said, under the circumstances, I don't think there's anything he can do that isn't very low return-on-time/money-invested to make his laptop run any CPU-intense game from the last several years (Oblivion not even getting past a load screen is a telling data point), and that's sort of the point of this thread. I'm not even talking about games at max, or even reasonable specs. I'm saying that the vast majority of non-indie games released post-2005 are going to run like garbage on his laptop no matter what he does, if they'll even run at all.


Icemage

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

I got Oblivion mostly just to have it there in the library for the future. I have my 360 copy as a fallback in the meantime. I knew going it most non-indie stuff post 2006 didn't have much of a chance running. I just installed Oblivion to see where the limit really was and Oblivion is really low end for the current generation (or maybe I'm just confusing the fact it looks like ass for this generation). I had already tried Portal 2 and that was a disaster. Oh it would run, but once Wheatley started moving the room it was stutter city.

I'm fine with indies and smaller stuff for now. There's plenty of that.

Though i do wonder which version of VVVVVV I should get. costs like a buck or two more on 3DS, but it has newer content and I can take it with me. Hmmm.

Its not exactly a resource hog no matter which version you pick. Cave Story + is kind of in the same boat, coming to 3DS eShop, but likely the same price point as Steam when its not on sale.

[Aeni]

That's fine, but as I said, under the circumstances, I don't think there's anything he can do that isn't very low return-on-time/money-invested to make his laptop run any CPU-intense game from the last several years (Oblivion not even getting past a load screen is a telling data point), and that's sort of the point of this thread. I'm not even talking about games at max, or even reasonable specs. I'm saying that the vast majority of non-indie games released post-2005 are going to run like garbage on his laptop no matter what he does, if they'll even run at all.


Icemage

I'm not disputing with you at all (or anyone else for that matter) but if he wanted to purchase a new laptop (or say, he has a new mac book ... he could run VM) it's not as bad as it used to be and getting a cheap "new" PC will be good enough for many of Steam's offering (which, let's face it, is stocked with a lot of "older" titles, as new titles aren't exactly flooding their library)

My current desktop is powered by a 6 year old CPU and is running just fine for almost everything I've tried to run on.