Arma on laptop with Geforce 8600m

[the_bengine 0]

Hi guys

I finally managed to tempt a friend of mine who i used to play OFP with years ago to come round and have a bash at Arma. I'd been constantly raving about it to him so he thought he'd bring his spanking new hi-spec laptop round so i could mod him up to the eyeballs (CSM, ArmaEffects..etc) and have a bash at a few coop missions.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we ended up ditching the laptop completely and using my second machine because his laptop, armed with an Nvidia Geforce 8800m (don't know if it was the GTX or GTS, the 'M' range look very similar on paper) simply couldn't handle any settings above "very low" or "disabled" and the resolution width set to around 600 or 700.

It just ended up looking like a lego based amiga game.

Now i know that a laptop gfx card will never be able to keep up with the equivalent PCIx card but his couldn't keep up with my old Quadro FX1300 from about 4-5 years ago.

We tried running older versions of arma with and without mods but to no avail.

Is there something we're missing or should we simply give up the idea of trying to run arma on this particular machine.

thanks for any help in advance.

ps the good news is he's still been converted over to arma.

[BraTTy 0]

That laptop should run Arma.I ran it on my laptop:

AMD 4000+ cpu, 1 meg ddr and a x600 Ati video card!

I'm thinking maybe he has powersave settings too low?

Not sure about Nvidia mobile but ATI also has power save settings for my video too, so also check power settings for the video

[mc sonar 0]

i guess there is something wrong with the laptop?

i can play arma on my dell inspiron 8600 with ati 9600 pro turbo.

it only runs with 1 gig of ram and a pentium M with 2 ghz. ok, my settings are most on low and viewdistance is 900m but frame rate is 18 (in the woods)-30 (open field).

[the_bengine 0]

well, like i said, it does run arma and i think the frame rate was in the region of about 18-25 (according to FRAPS). just not in slightest bit well.

unfortunately, the computer not being here or belonging to me i can't comment as to the driver situation. he assures me they're up to date.

hmmm, maybe i'll get him to join in this thread.....

[volkov956 0]

I got a x1600 and on the lowest settings on the labtop it runs the game at 16-24FPS :/

[the_bengine 0]

according to here:

Mobile gfx card Benchmark tests

the 8800m GTS gets 7748 and the GTX gets 9112 in 3dmark 06.

and my GFX card (7900GTO 512mb) gets around 5200.

how come his mobile GFX card can't get near to mine in terms of performance in Arma. Are the requirements of arma really that different to those in 3dMark 06?

[BraTTy 0]

We tried running older versions of arma with and without mods but to no avail.

Did you try ver 1.09b of Arma, quite a bit of performance improvement with that version

(I didn't run Arma on my laptop by the time 1.09 came out, I'd like to see the difference tho)

[the_bengine 0]

yeah. we started with 1.09beta and went from there...

[shinRaiden 0]

Are you sure it's an 8800m and not an 8600m? 86's are quite common, while 88's are still rather rare.

[the_bengine 0]

have just checked with him and you're completely right,

it is an 8600m. am i to believe that there's no hope of improving the graphics in arma?

[paragraphic l 2]

try getting some newer drivers could help

as I used to be able to play with an 6800go card

mobile drivers are not that common to be released by nvidia so go check this site for latest mobile drivers: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com

I guess that should help, and you should have at least 256MB of dedicated memory for you card, no shared memory or wathever crap they give some notebook cards

[shinRaiden 0]

At least Nvidia users get drivers. ATI does not provide drivers for laptop video chips, they expect the mfgr's to provide and maintain them.

The 8600m has sufficient performance for ArmA, you probably just need to fiddle with the settings and balance it.

[Mabes 0]

I'd say check for drivers, I run ArmA on my Vaio, which has an nVidia 7400 in it and it run at around 30FPS.

Try the low-plants mod with it as well.

[the_bengine 0]

cheers guys

we did spend quite a while messing around with the settings to get the fps up but it was only ever successful when turning every aspect of the detail down. maybe there's a 'sweet spot' that we missed but i really can't believe it would've made that much difference.

we also tried the lowplants mod early on but it didn't help much (on my 7900gto i can't live without it)

will investigate the driver options, cheers for the link...