ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP

[Checkers]

I play RTW on a Toshiba laptop(Pentium IV 2.8, 512 shared memory) and am fairly pleased with its performance in handling the game at medium and large unit sizes at medium to high detail levels. I was surprised my card could handle it this well with reasonable smoothness in the graphics. What has been the experience of others with a laptop using this card?

[Chuck]

I also have a Toshiba laptop it is a Satellite A75-S206 with a Pentium IV 2.8, but with 1GB of Ram, and an Omega Driver which makes playing Rome Total War all the better. Before I switched drivers it wasn't playing to well, and since I have switched over, it runs great on medium to high settings, I can play almost anything on it, including both Call of Dutys and of course Rome Total War.

[Chuck]

Oh yea, forget to mention that it has the same videocard which is the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP with 128 MB of shared VRam.

[Checkers]

Chuck, I have never changed my drivers up to now, however, after your post, I started to look into it. I checked on the ATI website and they have a driver class called Catalyst 5.6 which they seem to be recommending. I don't know what type of driver I currently have, or how to find out, but it the one that came with the laptop.

Why did you opt for the the Omega driver instead, and any downsides? How difficult and risky is the process of changing drivers given that, by my understanding, you have to uninstall what is currently on your machine?

Thanks.

[Chuck]

All you have to do is go to www.omegadrivers.net, and on this website it shows you how to change the driver from catalyst to Omega. Basically your picture will look a lot better on this driver, and it will give it a small boost in performance, and if you want to risk it their is also a overclocking utility built right into the driver.