Witcher 2 optimization for an ancient PC?

cj iwakura

So yeah, I'm wanting to dive back into the game, but it's nigh unplayable for me on anything but easy.
My CPU's ancient, but I'm attached to it.

I'm willing to upgrade my PC if needed because, well, I figure that's cheaper than buying a 360 and W2 again.

Here's some specs, not sure if it's enough:






The video card is an upgrade, got it many years ago for F.E.A.R. Yeah.


If I can run it on this, what's the best optimization?

If not, what should I get? Try to spell it out if you can, I'm not too savvy on PC upgrading. :P

Thanks!

KitFez

My knee-jerk reaction would be to replace your PC, given that not only is your graphics card likely not going to cut it if you want to run Witcher 2, nor will your one and a half gigs of RAM (and to a lesser extent, your OS). Of course, that's likely out of your price range, so a good first step would be to get at least a few more gigabytes of RAM humming away in thee. It's cheap to get, and the improvement it makes to your PC is instantly noticeable (particularly if going from 1.5GB to, say, 4GB or 8GB.

cj iwakura

Couldn't I just upgrade the card again?

KitFez

Yeah, but it's not just your graphics card that will run the game. Your RAM will need to be quite high to handle the game's demands - have a look at the back of the box and see what it says you need to have. It could be that your GPU is running Witcher 2 fine, but your RAM/other factors can't handle it.

Scosglen

Your processor is ancient. Almost 9 years old. It's a very slow single core and it's going to hugely bottleneck any other hardware that you try to shove into the machine at this point. The rest of the machine is super old too.

You could spend ~$100 and stick in a budget 6 series Radeon HD card and some more RAM but you might not actually see any improvement in a modern game like Witcher 2. If the game is unplayable when you have already turned everything down as low as it goes and are running at 800x600, that generally points to the CPU not pulling its weight.

Great Scott

Things I've Found About Low-End Graphics Cards:

Texture size is usually not an issue for cards with memory on-board (regardless of speed), so turning that lower than medium won't help.

What will help? Besides the obvious of not using AA and AF, Shadows; for some reason Shadow Quality give a performance boost out of all proportion to how much it affects visual quality.

EDIT: Reviewed your post again... you're running in a window. That's usually a bad move, you almost always pick up a few FPS by running Full-Screen, since the video card doesn't have to layer the game on the Windows desktop that way.

MichaelLC

Great Scott wrote: »

EDIT: Reviewed your post again... you're running in a window. That's usually a bad move, you almost always pick up a few FPS by running Full-Screen, since the video card doesn't have to layer the game on the Windows desktop that way.

Is that why the GC says 800x600, but the Win Display Manager says 1024x768?

Yeah, I don't think it'd be worth trying to upgrade piecemeal.

What;s your budget? Black Friday is coming - should be able to find a new Win7 machine for a few hundred. I've been able to run (with occasional slow downs) Witcher 1, Saints Row (The) Third, and Darksiders II all on a laptop that the specs says won't do it:



So you don't neccicarily need top-of-the-line, but I think between the cost and the benefit of getting Win7 plus a fresh start, it'd be worth it for a new machine.

cj iwakura

I use 1024, but I thought the game might run better if I set the resolution lower, so I was experimenting.
(It really made no difference.)

Witcher 1 runs fairly well on this computer, excepting demanding areas like the fields of grain in Chapter 4, so if I invest, I'd definitely want it to last me until the next next gen like this one has. :P

I will consider it though.

Is there a way to disable the game from appearing in widescreen, or am I stuck with that because it's a 4x3 monitor?

Also, I'd get screens, but prtscr doesn't seem to work with W2.


I could swing a few hundred, but I'd need a good idea of what sort of processor/specs to look for with W2 in mind.

Great Scott

Intel has a problem right now - their "low end" CPUs aren't slow. For that matter, really decent AMD machines are really cheap at the moment, and they come with much better built-in video cards (if you don't want to spring for a separate card).

For one example, a Dell Inspiron 660s is about $450 and supposedly has a PCI express x16 slot (although it probably doesn't have a power cable for high-end video cards). It appears to come stock with a i3-2130, which is faster than (for gaming) an old first-gen I7-920 or the fastest AMD Phenom II ever made. I just looked this up on Anandtech's Bench CPU comparison to make sure.

The point is, you don't need to spend a ton of money to get a major upgrade from where you are, but keep in mind that Intel onboard graphics (HD 2000 with an i3) isn't much faster than the Nvidia 8400GS card you have now.