How to play the game on Aspire One ?

[RejZoR]

The thing is, Defense Grid runs great on my main system (C2D 3,75GHz, 6GB RAM and HD4850).
However i'm also using ACER Aspire One (Atom N270,1GB RAM and Intel GMA950).
I've set it to Low detail and tried both 640x480 and native 1024x600. No joy.
What bothers me the most is that graphics look totally lame, but framerate is just terrible.
Now i understand that GMA950 is rather crappy, but what i don't understand is why for example UT2004 works nicely with quite high settings but Defense Grid doesn't. In fact it doesn't run well at all even on sister's laptop with Turion X2, 2GB of RAM and GeForce 9400M.

I'm wondering if there are any other hidden tweaks or settings to run the game in i don't know, DX7 mode or to speed it up in any way. The game is awesome, but i can't play it on my netbook because it runs way too slow.

Thx

[RejZoR]

Urm, anyone? Is this forum dead or something? Is there really not a single tweak that would significantly increase framerate of this thing on Aspire One?

[jeff]

The situation appears to be very much about the graphics cards.





The Intel GMA950 doesn't have the shader processing power that the HD4850 has.*





The HD4850 has a TeraFlop of shader processing power and a texel fill rate of 25 GTexels/second.*





The GMA950 has about 1/1000th the processing power and 1/25th the fill rate.* Also, it is likely it is using much slower main system memory than it is*using*dedicated video memory.* That is pretty much what you are seeing about why it is so slow.*





The reason that UT2004 works well with it, is that it has both a fixed-function (non-shader DX7) rendering path and a shader-based path.* Defense Grid only has a DX9 shader-based rendering path (as shader based cards have been common since 2003 and in a title with this size*budget one can really only develop one rendering path).





Supporting shader-only*rendering obviously wasn't viable when UT2004 was developed so they had to do a fixed function path as well.* Many games released now do a shader-only path.





As for the Turion X2 with a GeForce 9400M, it should work much better on that laptop. *It is about 1/16th as powerful in shader processing and 1/6th as powerful in fill as your HD4850 which is much better obviously than 1/1000th and 1/25th.* Again, if it has dedicated video memory can be a big impact on whether or not the chip can run at full speed on that laptop.











Jeff

[RejZoR]

Thx, but i was more wondering if those um excessive DX9 effects could be disabled, not by using entirely different rendering path. I could live with severely (visually) crippled game if i could only play it smoothly on Aspire One. DX9 runs fine on GMA950, but all the effects in Defense Grid seem to bog it down even on lowest settings regardless.

I mean, wouldn't it be possible to disable heat haze, distortion effects, decrease the amount of elements in explosions, disable bump mapping (on objects, level and aliens), disable shadows etc?
This should make it playable imo. Because i'd really love to play Defense Grid wherever i go with my netbook, but i just can't. And other tower defense games just plain suck. But Defense Grid is nearly perfect game.

[jeff]

The minimum code path the game uses is in fact the "low" quality setting where it does as you are suggesting, skipping certain shaders, uses lower resolution textures to help with fill rate, turns many effects off, etc.* What you are likely looking for is a fixed function graphic pipeline and Defense Grid does not have one of those, it is only shader-based.* I'm sorry about that.





Jeff

[RejZoR]

Oh well, i guess i'll have to live with it. Too bad, because it would be a perfect game to play on netbook.