Integrated Graphics: unlocking high and ultra detected settings

I have a couple of questions at the end if someone would be so kind as to lend their expertise.

I just bought my first Total War game, Napoleon limited edition. My system is pretty old by today's standards. A laptop with the Radeon HD 4200 chipset.

Anyway, I loaded NTW with steam. I must be an old timer because I had no idea what steam was. But to the point, started playing the game and could only choose up to medium settings. The auto detect feature pretty much picked all medium settings. It was not bad performance for an old laptop with Windows XP (32-bit) and 2GB RAM with a 2.8 gig dual-core CPU.

Well back to the point, I decided to play around in the BIOS and found a setting for the amount of RAM to apply to the internal graphics. It was set on Auto. First, I tried to set it to 256MB (minimum NTW recommended). Nothing really changed in the game for me. Then I tried 512MB. BTW, somewhere around this time I also increased the default GPU clock from 500MHz to 900MHz (it can top out at 1000Mhz for me but lowered it a bit for safety).

At the 512MB setting, I could choose the Ultra settings. I went back to the 256MB setting to make sure this was the only difference for this change. I could only choose medium settings again. The auto detect feature at the 512MB gives me mostly high settings. The game still plays but with much nicer graphics up close but with a much slower response time (as I would expect). Fine tuning most of the settings back down to medium or low with the aspects I really wanted, large troop count and ultra troop image quality. Forgive me if I cannot remember the exact names for these effects. Anyway, this fine tuning has me seeing pretty nice battles with acceptable performance.

I did encounter one problem. The game crashed due to low virtual memory. I increased my paging file size and I no longer get the crashing. I must have hit a memory bottleneck with 1.5 gigs of RAM listed as available due to the amount given to the IGP. But barely a memory issue because it does not happen when the IGP is set to Auto and using somewhere between 32MB and 256MB I would guess. Maybe the system does dish out more RAM during game play. Any way to tell my memory usage in the middle of a game?

Btw, I have tried Napoleon Total Combat too. It crashes in big battles with 400 troops per unit. I am guessing that I need more memory. I would rather limit paging during the game anyway. Anything else that could cause this behavior? No other mods are loaded. Campaign and smaller battles have no problems.

Thanks

Integrated graphics chips rob all their memory from the cpu's ram. From what you describe, the best advice is leave everything on auto and be happy you can play.

Anything else that can help will cost money starting with a more up to date computer.

I know the empire on all ultra takes 1.5 gigs of video memory. Sorry, that's all I know.