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So the wife expressed interest in playing a different MMO together again, and I suggested GuildWars or Guildwars 2 to her. So I jump onto "Systemrequirementslab" to see if her laptop can handle it. Heres the problem, it says she failed, and showed the results. She has greens on everything but the GPU. Then shows the requirements for the graphics on the game, heres what it shows

Pixel shader 3.0--- 4.1
vertex shader 3.0---4.1
DRM 254--384




Sooo...clearly her laptop has more than enough to play on minimum yes? Because she actually passes on what is needed. Now I know SRLabs can be a finiky bitch, it said my OLD PC couldnt run WoW and would die trying, yet I ran all the way up till CATA on the old boy, and for some really annoying reason, it never shows my new GPU I installed andis stuck on my old poopy one. But I use them for a basic benchtest.


Would her laptop work? Is there a free trial or something else I can try and see if her laptop actually pushes the game? Because ID be bummed if we spent the money setting ourselves up, only to have her laptop be all jerky and annoying to play.

Thanks

I'd just check the minimum requirements against the laptops specs to be sure,
SystemRequirementsLab always seems to completely misread on my pc.
I can list the Requirements in a while if you need them

But it isn't the most system intensive game, so unless it's fairly old, it'll probably run fine.

Just compare your specs vs the requirements. A program to tries to compare could be thrown off by outdated driver revisions and the like.

Thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it's a great looking game, but a year after it has been released, it utilizes the CPU for many tasks that should be relegated to the GPU.

Should run fine on minimum settings though you could try higher.

We can't reasonably answer this question without knowing - what GPU does her PC have...?

Most laptops have an integrated card, which isn't as good, but GW2 shouldn't be too harsh on it on the minimums.

 Melissia wrote:
Most laptops have an integrated card, which isn't as good, but GW2 shouldn't be too harsh on it on the minimums.

This is what I was wondering. It's the difference between what I would call an integrated full-on card, which is at least useful if not as good as a typical desktop version... then there's the terribad-for-gaming integrated *chip*. In either case the game will be playable, but there's a world of difference in performance terms.

I forgot to mention how you can get this information. Easiest way I can think of (assuming this is Windows) is to go to the Start menu, and either in the Search box or a Run box, type "dxdiag" and hit Enter. Then check the display tab, which gives you the name.

Yea its integrated. Thanks to a cool DAKKAchum, he let me check the game out! It works, ish. Its a little laggy in spots and runs great in others, guess it really depends on where Im at. The wife is going to check it out later tonight and see whats what

Integrated laptop cards never on par or as useful with desktop graphics. I have a massive Asus laptop with an nvidia 560M dedicated (that's a standalone dedicated card) with 3gigs of dedicated memory and my desktop's 6870 radeon still outperforms it AND I have a second one for crossfire if I need it. I think the issue with any laptop GPU is heat. It just has no space to disperse the heat and not nearly enough air flow to move it out of the case.

What you really want to look for is dedicated graphic memory. Integrated GPUs share the system memory but some laptops will have a dedicated memory module that is accessed only by the GPU. You can do some gaming with those types of laptops. I would stay away from the laptops that have integrated GPUs and only 4 or 6 gigs of memory as that leaves very little if any resources for the GPU to work with.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I am currently GW2 with all settings maxed out and I have between 30 and 40 FPS. My system has 16gigs DDR. A radeon 6870 with 1gig of memory. An AMD 960t quad core at 3.4ghz.

If this helps, I run GW 2 on an i5 2.6ghz, 4gb RAM and a nVidia gtx 275 with just under 1gb of RAM, and it plays fine on medium/high until I hit big zergs in wvw or world boss encounters in PvE. Said encounters are still playable, but very slow.