Performance Question

Ok, I've been reading some forums and threads lately and noticed that people seem to be able to run their games quite fast at pretty damned high resolutions, some with computers very close to mine. So, any ideas on why my computer runs games like Serious Sam, Alice, RtCW, and such with some fair amount of slowdown in them at times?

I'm running them at 640x480, sometimes 512x400, usually 16-bit color and textures, with some details turned on, some off. Even then, some games seem to slow down quite often. And then, my new game 'Tsunami 2265' runs at 640x480x16 at about 10-20 fps! And this game suggests a TNT2 card and a P3 600mHz for best performance. I do believe my laptop far exceeds that.

Still, Unreal and Unreal Tournament run full-speed with all the bells and whistles turned on. Even the editor runs nicely when I make a curved surface with like 256 faces. And jDoom runs fine (still have it in 640x480x32), except with 3d models and interpolation. WTF?

Anyone know why this is? Anyone experience this before? Just thought I'd ask. I never bothered to question this before, as it's done this since I first started to use modern day 3d games on it.

My specs are:
Pentium III 1.1gHz
nVidia GeForce 2 Go, 16mb, Detonator 40 drivers
WindowsXP Professional w/SP1

Try running them at higher settings, some cards are slow in basic settings, try 32 bit and 1024

TeamKill said:

nVidia GeForce 2 Go, 16mb, Detonator 40 drivers

KABOOM! Right there's your problem.

Did it with my Detonator 20 drivers as well.

Ha, I play Empire Earth, and it runs like crap (every setting on lowest), playable, but major suckage, and my system easily supasses the recommended reqs. I've got a PIII 556, 320 MB ram, and a geforce4. A processor upgrade would definatly help alot....but it should still run halfway respectable....christ, I had quake 3 running on a amdk6 233 32 MB ram with a steath 3 lol....all settings lowest and it ran fine, hehe

Also, some cards will prefer certain APIs (I dont know the specifics about the GForce 2 Go). I.e. I can run JDoom at 1024 by 768 perfectly in D3D mode, but get crap when using OpenGL. Same with Half-Life.

Yeah, the problem is your Geforce 2 Go. The Geforce 2 Go is a piece of shit. It's basically an MX, only it sucks more. (more than an MX400, anyway) A PIII 1.1Ghz means it's a Tualatin, which means it basically owns all ass as far as clock-for-clock goes. A 1.1Ghz Tualatin will wipe the floor with a 1.1 and even a 1.2Ghz Tbird. Of course, the newer XPs return the favor, but then...duh.

But then, really, your problem is that you're trying to game on a laptop. AndrewB aside, virtually anyone will tell you that gaming on a laptop is just not as "do-able" as gaming on a desktop.