Troubleshooting with lag

[Revshawn]

So here we go...I've just finished installing the game and I'm facing lag with all areas of the game except for the title screen and the cutscenes. I'm not made of money so what do I need?

A better graphics card? Some more ram on my ram drive?

And how do you check for what your computer has?

[katank]

run dxdiag to see what you have and then post your system's specs. Your inquiry may be better addressed in the apothecary forum.

A free solution to better performance may be defragging your hard drive. Done that lately?

[Revshawn]

Ahh no I haven't done that lately...good idea! Though I think that it'll help minimally.

[katank]

True, RAM can never hurt. Try turning down some of the video options and updating your video drivers etc. If any of that makes a difference, it's probably your graphics card.

BTW, welcome to the .Org forums.:balloon2:

[Revshawn]

Alright then! I'm defragmenting my hard drive. So what kind of graphics card do you recommend? I turned all my graphics to minimal and I'm still experiencing lag. and is the graphics card truly a fix all?

And how to you check your system specs? I'm having trouble finding that right now.

[katank]

Hit windows key+R to bring up the run prompt. Type dxdiag and enter.

This should give you a run down of your machine's specs.

Graphics card is most definitely not a fix-all but is a likely candidate. Which graphics card to buy really depends upon your platform and budget. Post your specs first so we can have an idea of what may be going on.

[Revshawn]

http://i12.tinypic.com/2r6jhxu.png

Here's my system specs....sadly I don't know what most of this is lol!

But I do recognize I need more ram....and I don't know what video card I have.

[Musashi]

OMG... BUY MORE RAM!

Seriously, this game needs 3 times as much ram as you have, from what I've seen of people posting specs. I'd try to get my system up to 2 gigs if I were you though.

Also, turn off shadows in the options... easiest way to knock out a huge portion of the lag.

[Revshawn]

I know! WTF? I told my mother to give me the money and I'll buy my own PC. They told me that it had 1.04k ram on this sucker! Hold up....lemme put on my knights armor and go pwn him.

[katank]

Yep, the processor is ok but you sooo need more RAM. Think about upgrading graphics too. Your Presario has a Savage S3 IIRC. This is pretty bad. Consider GeForce 6xxx series and above or Radeon X8xx series and above. Decent cards can be had for ~$100 that would go a long way.

[Shahed]

The page file is too low, I think. But then considering the RAM...

[Quillan]

Yeah, that looks like the system has 512 megs of ram, and 64 megs is dedicated to that onboard video chip. I'm not sure if that model has a PCI-Express video card slot on the board or not, but if it does, I'd recommend a 7600 card.

[Ars Moriendi]

Your video card is most likely GF6150 (comes with the newer nforce chipset motherboards). It should go up to 128MB shared video memory, but you currently only have 64MB of it - so you might try increasing that. See if there's an option for it in the BIOS. Be warned that, even if it's possible, it might do more harm than good since your main RAM is so low - doing this will deny another 64mb for OS's use.

Your best chance is, as other have noted, to get more RAM and a real video card. Your system should support up to 2GB RAM and it's almost certain that there's a PCI-xpres slot in it (but check to make sure before you buy!).