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May. 25th, 2004 12:37 amOkay. This is what the Tech support told me. What do you think? Should I trust this "Driverheaven" mod program
When playing games on a portable system it is important to keep in mind the limitations of that computing platform. Because you are limited by space and power requirements, there are numerous performance issues you may see...graphical errors, crashes, lag/latency, disconnects, etc. While there are a number of things you can do to help alleviate some of these issues, you will still always be limited by the portable platform.
Here are some possible workarounds and/or things you can do to help offset the performance hits you can take when playing on a portable system:
The first thing you should do is verify you are using the most recent driver updates for your video card from your manufacturer. If those are up to current and you are still experiencing problems, the issue may be your video card driver and or laptop working as it is intended. The graphic chipset drivers for portable systems, by design, will downgrade the performance of your video card as it gets pushed to it's limits. It does this in order to keep the card from overheating and causing damage to you system. Your system itself will also downgrade it's overall performance to utilize battery power and to also try and alleviate or head-off heat-related issues. Because of this, it is best to play the game when the portable system is plugged in rather than when working off of battery power and to play in an environment that is conducive to keeping your system as cool as possible. Also, Your issues may be caused by having your AGP speed set to high. Please check the properties of your video card and change the AGP Speed setting from 8x to 4x.
Another thing you can do is reduce the time Windows spends dynamically increasing your pagefile which can cause lag and thereby graphics and disconnect issues. By default, Windows is set up to manage your settings...for general computing usage this is the optimal setting, but for higher-performance applications (like games) this can cause problems. What happens is this: regardless of how much physical memory you have available, Windows will always use some of the pagefile for virtual memory. As more memory is needed, it will dynamically increase the size of that file (pagefile.sys) to meet the increased demand. When it does this, it's adding processor cycles and memory allocations to force through the change which will often cause your processor and memory usage to spike extremely high (and can cause some applications to lock-up or display odd behavior). To get around this, manually reset your pagefile size to something large enough that you won't have Windows trying to increase it.
XP/2000: go into Control Panel, and then Performance and Maintenance (if you are using the default XP GUI, otherwise it's System), and then to System--In Windows2000, go into Control Panel and then System. On that window, choose the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. Click on the Advanced tab in that window as well and click on the Change button under Virtual Memory. Select Custom size, and then make the Initial size 1024 (approx 1gb) and the maximum size 2048 (approx 2gb).
This will allow Windows to increase the size if it absolutely has to (generally unnecessary when playing games), but provides enough space to where this is unlikely to happen. Once you've done this, click on OK and then let Windows reboot (it will tell you need to).
For the similar reasons as increasing your minimum pagefile settings, it is also important to make sure to keep you drive data-fragmentation down to a minimum. To do this, Windows has a built-in defragmentation utility.
Windows XP/2000: go to Control Panel and choose Performance and Maintenance (if you are using the Windows Classic GUI or are using Windows2000, you can go directly to Administrative Tools), and then Administrative Tools. Choose Computer Management, and then Disk Defragmenter. Defragment your drive until at least most of your data allocation is showing blue and on the left-hand-side of the display (you may need to reboot once or twice to get some files to move)
Finally, there are some workarounds that have been posted to our message boards and elsewhere on the internet that, while completely unsupported by us, have helped some of our customers see increased performance when playing on portable systems. There are some 3rd-party utilities that can increase your game performance by disabling the "downgrading" your video card driver does.
PLEASE NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND IS COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED BY NCSOFT. PERFORMING THE FOLLOWING ACTIONS MAY CAUSE YOUR SYSTEM TO BEHAVE ERRATICALLY AND MAY EVEN CAUSE DAMAGE TO YOUR VIDEO CARD OR COMPUTER.
First off, this workaround is only for the following supported video cards:
Mobility 9600
Mobility Radeon 9000
Mobility Radeon 9200
IGP 340M /345M
What you need to do is first is get a current version of Catalyst (Name of the ATI Driver set) from ATI web site:
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
Make sure you do not pick “mobility”. You want the XP or 2000 version of the drivers. Now go and get this program from DriverHeaven.net:
http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/
Once at this site, they have for the rest of the instructions to finish this special installation. We hope this helps clarify the issue. You should just need an updated driver given a new one is available.
Thanks,
John
PlayNC Tech Support
When playing games on a portable system it is important to keep in mind the limitations of that computing platform. Because you are limited by space and power requirements, there are numerous performance issues you may see...graphical errors, crashes, lag/latency, disconnects, etc. While there are a number of things you can do to help alleviate some of these issues, you will still always be limited by the portable platform.
Here are some possible workarounds and/or things you can do to help offset the performance hits you can take when playing on a portable system:
The first thing you should do is verify you are using the most recent driver updates for your video card from your manufacturer. If those are up to current and you are still experiencing problems, the issue may be your video card driver and or laptop working as it is intended. The graphic chipset drivers for portable systems, by design, will downgrade the performance of your video card as it gets pushed to it's limits. It does this in order to keep the card from overheating and causing damage to you system. Your system itself will also downgrade it's overall performance to utilize battery power and to also try and alleviate or head-off heat-related issues. Because of this, it is best to play the game when the portable system is plugged in rather than when working off of battery power and to play in an environment that is conducive to keeping your system as cool as possible. Also, Your issues may be caused by having your AGP speed set to high. Please check the properties of your video card and change the AGP Speed setting from 8x to 4x.
Another thing you can do is reduce the time Windows spends dynamically increasing your pagefile which can cause lag and thereby graphics and disconnect issues. By default, Windows is set up to manage your settings...for general computing usage this is the optimal setting, but for higher-performance applications (like games) this can cause problems. What happens is this: regardless of how much physical memory you have available, Windows will always use some of the pagefile for virtual memory. As more memory is needed, it will dynamically increase the size of that file (pagefile.sys) to meet the increased demand. When it does this, it's adding processor cycles and memory allocations to force through the change which will often cause your processor and memory usage to spike extremely high (and can cause some applications to lock-up or display odd behavior). To get around this, manually reset your pagefile size to something large enough that you won't have Windows trying to increase it.
XP/2000: go into Control Panel, and then Performance and Maintenance (if you are using the default XP GUI, otherwise it's System), and then to System--In Windows2000, go into Control Panel and then System. On that window, choose the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. Click on the Advanced tab in that window as well and click on the Change button under Virtual Memory. Select Custom size, and then make the Initial size 1024 (approx 1gb) and the maximum size 2048 (approx 2gb).
This will allow Windows to increase the size if it absolutely has to (generally unnecessary when playing games), but provides enough space to where this is unlikely to happen. Once you've done this, click on OK and then let Windows reboot (it will tell you need to).
For the similar reasons as increasing your minimum pagefile settings, it is also important to make sure to keep you drive data-fragmentation down to a minimum. To do this, Windows has a built-in defragmentation utility.
Windows XP/2000: go to Control Panel and choose Performance and Maintenance (if you are using the Windows Classic GUI or are using Windows2000, you can go directly to Administrative Tools), and then Administrative Tools. Choose Computer Management, and then Disk Defragmenter. Defragment your drive until at least most of your data allocation is showing blue and on the left-hand-side of the display (you may need to reboot once or twice to get some files to move)
Finally, there are some workarounds that have been posted to our message boards and elsewhere on the internet that, while completely unsupported by us, have helped some of our customers see increased performance when playing on portable systems. There are some 3rd-party utilities that can increase your game performance by disabling the "downgrading" your video card driver does.
PLEASE NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND IS COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED BY NCSOFT. PERFORMING THE FOLLOWING ACTIONS MAY CAUSE YOUR SYSTEM TO BEHAVE ERRATICALLY AND MAY EVEN CAUSE DAMAGE TO YOUR VIDEO CARD OR COMPUTER.
First off, this workaround is only for the following supported video cards:
Mobility 9600
Mobility Radeon 9000
Mobility Radeon 9200
IGP 340M /345M
What you need to do is first is get a current version of Catalyst (Name of the ATI Driver set) from ATI web site:
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
Make sure you do not pick “mobility”. You want the XP or 2000 version of the drivers. Now go and get this program from DriverHeaven.net:
http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/
Once at this site, they have for the rest of the instructions to finish this special installation. We hope this helps clarify the issue. You should just need an updated driver given a new one is available.
Thanks,
John
PlayNC Tech Support
