DW on Laptop
 

Hi everyone


I've been trying to get DW to work on my laptop with limited success as it seems to crash severely whenever 3d is accessed or manipulated. The intro seems to run fine. The game crashes as soon as I try to access the graphics settings in the options screen or if I'm viewing a 3d window in the game itself.

Now I can switch it to 'no 3d' in the .ini file and the game seems to work ok, but it seems as if I would be limited to screens without 3d (i.e no FFG bridge, sub periscope etc). I wouldnt mind so much but when it crashes it doesnt just CTD it reboots compltely and has to run scan disk. I'm sure the graphics adaptor is at fault but I didnt think you'd need a particularly high end card to run DW.

If anyone has experience getting DW to run on integrated graphics laptop I'd most grateful for your help!


The laptops specs are as follows:
Sempron 2800+
512mb RAM
Graphics: VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP

You don't need a super high spec GFX chip but the one you have is isn't the greatest.

No 3d I think is where you don't have the 3d view in the nav map.

If you don't have a "name brand" GFX chip in your laptop you are going to have problems.

Many laptops use third rate onboard GFX processors that aren't really made for 3d work.

I'm lucky that I have a "genuine" NVIDIA 5200 in my mine, but with anything less there would be an issue I believe.

I couldn't get Combat Mission to run above a crawl on my other laptop using a IGP something something third rate garbage chipset and I'm sure DW would be even more impossible.

Thanks for the quick replies! :)

As I suspected, lack of dedicated graphics is the problem. Oh well it was kind of just an experiment anyway to see if I could take it to a LAN at a friends house, I'll stick to my Radeon equipped desktop for now.

By the way Luftwolf, I'm a quite a combat mission fan - what a great game, got a PBEM underway as we speak!


Cheers guys

WOOT CM! Represent!

I've got about 9 games going now, down from 25-30 games, including about 15 tournaments and campaigns.

I'm in the Band of Brothers, the BEST gaming club on the net for ANY game. :rock:

There's none better, not even close.

www.webandofbrothers.de

Cool! I'll be sure to check that out. I've only played three games of CMBO in PBEM so far. I'm currently on my fourth, its such a great game.

DW is also good though... :|\

mine works perfectly on laptop and i got cor a 256mb ram

We are always accepting new members, using the sponsership system.

Check out the member page for sponsers.

We currenlty have 270 ACTIVE members, many of whom post daily on our forum. There are currently about 15 tournaments running and 6 independent campaigns, which you are most welcome to join after completing your sponsership period, which lasts about one PBEM game with your sponser.

Hope to see you over on the BoB forum! :rock:

Biologic, I play DW on my sony vaio PCG-FR315B (no desktop where I live now, :shifty: ). It has a Radeon IGP 345 that (this is funny) isn't supported from ATI.
With Sony stock drivers I have not managed to play games newer than about 2 year. I solved it using at first a modified drivers set (Omega :up: :up: ) and then Ati stock Catalyst modded (dhmodtool). Now I can play DW without problems (but the water isn't great :88) . And I use 32 or 64 Mb of shared memory.

So my suggestions are:
1) Look for new or modded drivers for your laptop.
2) Play with the properties of your video card. I've been surprised from the cut on artefacts it can do.

DW requires a DirectX9.0c compliant graphics card with the ability to use hardware acceleration (i.e. transform and lighting capability especially, vertex and pixel shading support is recommended but not required).

That's all I know... :know:

Runs fine on mine.

HP Pavilion 3ghz P4, 1gb ram DDR, 128mb ati 9000 gfx card (64MB dedicated, 64MB shared from main RAM)

Dell 9300 Inspirion 2ghz Pentium M, 2GB ram DDR2, 256 MB nvidia gforce go 6800 (all ram dedicated)

But the Dell laptop runs it about double speed to the "Faster" 3ghz Pavilion. I know the Pentium M chips are very quick reletive to clock speed but it mainly shows just how important a good gfx card is AND that the system is balenced. The top machine can't run doom, the bottom laptop can run it at max settings no problem.

S3 IGP cards are a mixed bunch. I had a P3 600 with a S3 savage IX card with a whopping 16mb. It ran SC no problems at all. Probably get the specs for yours off their website and see if it supports everything DW's site recommends. If you can't see any problems there make sure you have the latest drivers. If that won't solve it, try looking for 3rd party drivers. If you get 3rd party drivers, the 'latest' version number might not necessarily be the best. Try different version numbers till you find one that performs the best. The Dell uses 3rd party drivers and the difference was huge.

Thanks for all your replies its all been helpful, I might try and see if I can find some newer drivers.


Cheers

I have a Dell internal graphics controller and it's awful. It runs DW acceptably, but on the lowest graphics settings (low water quality, no reflection).

Runs fine on my laptop.

IBM Thinkpad X30.

The GPU is a chip from Intel. Handles display on two screens with quite impressive resolution and Hz values.

The only problem I have is once in the game, the CPU fans blows all the time until I quite the game.

Otherwise, works just fine including the 3D.

Folks, next time you buy a laptop please look at the gfx specs. If it reads "64MB Shared Video Memory" then your alarm should go off and you should look at something else.

I even play DW on my Flybook (www.flybook.info) and the only limiting factor there is the low CPU speed of the Transmeta processor. But it works. I use that Flybook in Multistation Multiplayer as some sort of "auxiliary console", and since it's a touch screen it is very cool to use for sonar work or controlling the torpedo tubes.