Before I buy a new video card, quick question...

AUVintage

I have an HP Pavilion laptop running an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M. I can run tribes, but I have the settings set very low. The game runs pretty good at times, not so good at others. When I get into some serious movement, for example, around the flag, the game begins to get pretty choppy. However, when I am skiing around by myself the game runs fine. I assumed this is a graphics card issue, but just wanted to make sure. Thanks.

ccfreak2k

It's a trick question because you can't upgrade your video hardware on a laptop.

Before someone chimes in saying "some laptops have removable video hardware!", I'll shoot that one down now by saying that I seriously doubt HP is one of the companies that manufactures such a board.

Shadowex3

Very strange issue since I used to play t2 on a geforce4 mx420 and 28K with little issue. I suggest playing around with your settings and seeing what seems to help the most. Turning off everything except the skybox for example helps a lot, and there are other settings that really make very little difference in the end.

AUVintage

Yeah, I actually boosted the settings up quite a bit and the game runs much smoother. Very strange, but I'll take it.

Abstract

Shadowex3 February 2009

Very strange issue since I used to play t2 on a geforce4 mx420 and 28K with little issue. I suggest playing around with your settings and seeing what seems to help the most. Turning off everything except the skybox for example helps a lot, and there are other settings that really make very little difference in the end.

Hell, i used to play the game on a pentium II 450 with a nvidia tnt2 and it ran fine. I don't think the problem you're running into has anything to do with video or processor.

Blakhart

The results you see from increasing settings rather than reducing them is likely due to caching done by the game. If settings aren't set to max, the game withholds data, caching data, untill called for by movement in the game. So there's constant trafic as the game loads and unloads textures and terrians to maintain that level of detail when if it had simply loded max detail and terrian right from the start you wouldn't have the issue of data traffic constantly occuring. Also, most newer laptops have fairly high resolution, 1168x1024 or higher, and higher resolution is nice but it really takes serious video card power to game well at higher resolutions. Add to this that you should always game at your lcd's native resolution. If you're stuck with low fps due to low powered video hardware and/or huge native resolution, you can get some fps back by setting your colour depth to 16bit rather than 32, and you might also try running frameskippa. Frameskippa is a script that reduces filler frames the game adds to your game experience to ensure smooth movement. A setting of no more than 3 usualy gets best results with frameskippa. Find it and try it.

UFO-POOFLY

You have to goto the Nvidia Control Panel (right click the desktop), and turn off stuff like anti-aliasing is a good one. You should find that under "Manage 3D settings". Hope that helps.

ccfreak2k

Blakhart February 2009

The results you see from increasing settings rather than reducing them is likely due to caching done by the game.

Caching would more likely be if the game loaded most of the graphics assets into system RAM but not necessarily into video RAM. If what you described is actually happening, that wouldn't be caching. FIlemon could probably confirm on-the-fly data loading from disk, but of course it would be quite useless if it's in RAM already (in which case it probably wouldn't be nearly as jerky).

Kurzand-Wey

Keep in mind that on a laptop, vid card share system RAM so video RAM = system RAM. Just not in the same amount.

As far as I know, Alienware is the only laptop with upgradeable video.
As much as I'd love to, there's no way I'm paying 3k + for a laptop.

Angry

I have a dell 1505 with a 7300 GS, and it plays tribes 2 fine. You may want to try switching to OpenGl. (I dont have a D3D option in WIndows 7 anyway)