RTW on a laptop?

[metalhead]

I've done a lot of searching on this topic, but gotten little help, so hopefully someone here can help me with this!

I really want to get this game, but don't know if my laptop's graphics card can handle it. I have an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 with only 16 MB of memory. The rest of my specs are 2.66 GHz processor with 1 G of memory and plenty of hard drive space. Anyone have luck playing the game on such a rig? I tried the demo and the graphics were all messed up, but I'm hoping maybe the actual game will have cleaned those problems despite my wimpy graphics card. Am I going to have to buy a new graphics card, or will this work out OK?

[player1]

From a readme:

Minimum System Requirements
• A version of Microsoft® Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP
• Pentium® III 1.0GHz (1000MHz) or Athlon™ 1.0GHz (1000MHz) processor or higher
• 256MB RAM
• 8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and latest drivers
• Full installation of Rome: Total War is required for this patch
• 60 MB of uncompressed free hard disk space for patch update
• 100% DirectX® 9.0b compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers
• 100% Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers
• DirectX® 9.0b
• 1024 x 768 Monitor Resolution
• 3D Hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX® 9.0b compatible 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card and the latest drivers*.

ATI® Radeon® 8500
ATI® Radeon 9000
ATI® Radeon 9500
ATI® Radeon 9600
ATI® Radeon 9700
ATI® Radeon 9800
All Nvidia® GeForce® 3 and higher
Important Note: *Some 3D accelerator cards with the chipsets listed here may not be compatible with the 3D acceleration features utilized by Rome: Total War™. Please refer to your hardware manufacturer for 100% DirectX 9.0b compatibility.
Multiplayer Requirements:
• Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported.
• Internet play requires broadband connection and latest drivers.
• LAN play requires network interface card and latest drivers.

[Razor1952]

I run on an Inspiron 8600 128 vram and 512 ram 1.6hz intel m and it runs fine.

I used to run MTW on my old Inspiron 5000 wih 8mb video, it ran like a dog , but it ran.

You may be lucky to get it to work by tweaking here and there, but I doubt it would be worth it, it would still be too slow( I'm thinking of utilities to use ram as video ram etc). Besides you have to select minumum resolutions specs.

[Zatoichi]

Hi Metalhead,

I got RTW running on my work laptop when my employers were kind enough to post me to Cape Town for 5 weeks. My nasty little Dell was even lower spec than yours (smaller processor and only 512Mb RAM), but it did have the same nasty integrated graphics card.

I got the game running with some lag on normal unit size, which astounded me. I had the unit detail at medium, but all other settings low (get used to playing on large brown polygons instead of terrain...). The only real slowdowns were during city seiges.

One weird thing was I had to turn the Fog Of War off in the preferences.txt, otherwise the whole campaign map was pretty much black, occasionally turning a faded grey area over parts of Greece. Unfortunately with the FOW off, you see everything that's going on - I rationalised this by pretending the Romans had invented spy sattelites 2000 years early (hey, it worked for me...)

A big word of warning - the above holds true only for RTW 1.0 or 1.1. When I installed 1.2, the tweaks and fancy stuff they added to the graphics caused my game to resemble a nightmare 60's acid flashback - lot's of trails, stutters and general graphical weirdness, basically making the game unplayable.

I wasted quite a bit of Kraellin et al's time in the Apocathery with all of the above, and did receive some very good advice (the FOW fix for my black campaign map, for example). Fortunately for me, patch 1.2 came out right at the end of my time in Cape Town, so installing it on my laptop and ruining my chance of playing Rome was not such a big problem.

Anyway - good luck with getting it running. I know there are other issues with 1.2 anyway, but my advice not to install it has nothing to do with any of that, just the fact that it taxed my poor little laptop with all the fancy visual bells and whistles it introduced...

[tai4ji2x]

i'm pretty sure you need a vidcard with at least 64mb ram

[Ginger]

This is something that it bugging me too- I want a laptop for uni work and some gaming but I cant afford the options with good separate graphics cards.

Im just hoping that mobility graphics cards, like cpus, are more efficient than their higher spec brothers. Otherwise its back to MTW/STW for this bunny!

[katank]

1.1 ran fine on my latop which is similar in specs. However, 1.2 did produce lots of weirdness. It caused ground textures to be sky textures in places and strange ghosting/blurring effects would occur.

It was generally disconcerting and more or less ruined battle map. The campaign map always requires turning off FOW or it's waaaay too dark.