Radeon 3200 BAD Performance

Hey so i have an HP pavilion dv5 1002nr with an ATI Radeon 3200 HD IGP card. For some reason it doesnt work very well on games i think its spose to have like 128 dedicated memory and go up to like half a gig shared or something idk but im only getting 128 and i cant figure out how to make it run better. so i look online and people are saying that it does it automatically when it needs it so i think thats whats wrong is that mines not doing it. the best gaming i can do is NFS Carbon on low detail in 800x600. Im running vista but its not the factory install because i was dualbooting with linux and had to reinstall vista cuz it got messed up.. please someone help me this laptop is killing me.

ps: (for extra points) do you think putting windows 7 on my laptop would fix the problem because im thinking about it??

Thanks ahead of time.

You can check your version of the video driver and then go to the AMD/ATI website and see what they are offering. Last time I looked, AMD/ATI is offering Catalyst version 10.1, ans since most of their improvements seem to be oriented toward gaming, that's probably going to be a lot newer than what you're running now.

OK, so you're probably running the default MS-provided drivers, which would give vritually NO hardware acceleration. See my previous comments about checking the driver version.

We're not a Win7 forum, so I can't give you official advise here, but Win7 and Vista use virtually the same drivers from AMD/ATI. So, upgrading to Win7 is not necessarily going to improve your game performance -- although, in general, nearly everything is faster in Win7 than it was in Vista.

i reinstalled the drivers and it says its version 9.12. im not sure how to get the later version. i have the catalyst control center and everything but i just cant figure out how to get it to utilize the most memory.. its deadly slow so im just frustrated i cant fully utilize my hardware

That's a recent catalyst version but the current version is 10.1. Google for ATI drivers, go to the AMD/ATI site, select the info relevant to your card model and OS, download the drivers, and install them.



I know of no way to tell Catalyst how much memory to use -- it simply uses what's there.



Is the machine dead slow in general? Or is it just slow when you play games?

thats exactly what i did to get the 9.12 version.. i just did it again tho and found a link to the hp site so i got that driver and its actually running a little better now.. i can play fallout 3 and assassins creed a little better but i feel like its still not performing the way it should.. the machine isnt slow in general it works fine its just the graphics that arent up to speed..

OK, glad to hear that it's not slow in general.



You can go into CCC and tweak the 3D settings -- more eye candy generally means slower frame rates and choppier video. But apart from that, don't know what else to tell you.

mm ok.. i have to run assassins creed at minimum everything graphics-wise.. and when the videos play there still pretty choppy.. does that sound right??

It doesn't sound right for a Radeon 3200 in general -- but your limitation of 128MB is most probably the culprit.



Since this is builtin graphics, there should be something in the BIOS setup that allows you to allocate more system memory. How much system memory do you have?



You'll need to check your system guide (if you have one) or go to the HP site and download the guides. They might also have a FAQ on how to increase your video memory allocation.

i have 3 gigs of ram. ive checked the bios and it doesnt allow you to change the amount its fixed.. ive googled and read other people having this problem thats where i heard about the thing that does it automatically.. i guess ill look again

well i just ordered an oem version of 7 so i shud have that by the end of the week i guess ill see how those drivers work but one thing i did notice is that my device manager does show that i have 1 unknown driver missing. i left it that way when i had to reinstall vista cuz it got messed up a while back and i couldnt figure out which one it was.. so i dont think thats causing the problem cuz i definately have the video driver but i find it interesting.. anyway, i guess it wont be relevant to post my results once i install 7 since this is vista forums but ill let you know how it works out anyway