I'm not in a position to buy a top of the line PC or a next gen console and I don't have enough connections or experience to build one myself at a bargain. So, with my trusty laptop sent to me by my dad a few years ago (a laptop that is meant mainly for college work and convenience) I tend to stick to older or less large scale games. That means indie or mid-tier games or AAA games that my laptop can run DECENTLY enough at the lowest settings AND still be playable.
Knowing my laptop could run Batman: Arkham Origins at minimum settings, I bought the game recently. I've mastered the mechanics well enough throughout the series that an unstable FPS that ranges from 15-25 is not a game breaker. I don't feel overly inconvenienced despite wishing I was playing at a stable 30 minimum. After beating the single player, I just decided to try the multiplayer. I don't think my current FPS range will fly in multiplayer. When playing against actual people that unsteady range, especially since a minimum of 30 is optimal obviously, can make quite a difference.
Here are the things I've done so far to get the FPS to be more steady and leans towards the higher numbers in the range I'm currently getting if not past the range entirely:
1) Use Razer Game Booster and GBoost. I've read Razer Game Booster may not be all that helpful in boosting performance, but I continue to use it anyway.
2) Went into the bmengine.ini file and changed all bsmoothframerate values to False and all min and maxes values for this to 0. While I was at it I changed AllowD3D11 from TRUE to FALSE and AllowD3D10 to True.
3) Installed this patch, which I thought looked kind of shady, but I was getting desperate in boosting performance:
4) Went into Task Manager and made sure no unnecessary processes were running along with setting the Origins "process" to a higher priority.
5) And of course, I set all graphical settings to minimum and turned off fullscreen.
What else could I do to boost performacne without breaking the game? I thought about messing more with configuration files some more, but outside of what I've done already I don't really know what I'm doing and don't want to mess with anything that will be a pain to fix. Unless someone can confirm that there's other stuff I can change in, say, bmengine.ini without worrying.
If it'll help to reference my specs here they are:
Acer Aspire 7551
AMD Phenom II X4 N970 Quad-Core Processor (2.2 GHz)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
4 GB DDR3 Memory Ram (3.75 useable)
64-Bit runnning Windows 7
What I've been trying to lead into mixed among all this rambling is what are your experiences in optimizing your PC for gaming, regardless of whether you have a low end rig or not, and NOT including upgrading hardware or just getting a brand new PC altogether, of course? As much as I'd like my problem resolved (I've already asked this question in forums more closely designed to help with these problems anyway) I'm more interested in the experiences people have doing this. This is the first time I've really tried to optimize a gaming experience. Most of my PC games don't require this much work to do this. I'm curious just how frustrating it might get for me the more I try and how well it's worked for some of you. For those with low end PCS who try to game anyway, what was the game you just couldn't do anything about without getting a better PC?
Knowing my laptop could run Batman: Arkham Origins at minimum settings, I bought the game recently. I've mastered the mechanics well enough throughout the series that an unstable FPS that ranges from 15-25 is not a game breaker. I don't feel overly inconvenienced despite wishing I was playing at a stable 30 minimum. After beating the single player, I just decided to try the multiplayer. I don't think my current FPS range will fly in multiplayer. When playing against actual people that unsteady range, especially since a minimum of 30 is optimal obviously, can make quite a difference.
Here are the things I've done so far to get the FPS to be more steady and leans towards the higher numbers in the range I'm currently getting if not past the range entirely:
1) Use Razer Game Booster and GBoost. I've read Razer Game Booster may not be all that helpful in boosting performance, but I continue to use it anyway.
2) Went into the bmengine.ini file and changed all bsmoothframerate values to False and all min and maxes values for this to 0. While I was at it I changed AllowD3D11 from TRUE to FALSE and AllowD3D10 to True.
3) Installed this patch, which I thought looked kind of shady, but I was getting desperate in boosting performance:
4) Went into Task Manager and made sure no unnecessary processes were running along with setting the Origins "process" to a higher priority.
5) And of course, I set all graphical settings to minimum and turned off fullscreen.
What else could I do to boost performacne without breaking the game? I thought about messing more with configuration files some more, but outside of what I've done already I don't really know what I'm doing and don't want to mess with anything that will be a pain to fix. Unless someone can confirm that there's other stuff I can change in, say, bmengine.ini without worrying.
If it'll help to reference my specs here they are:
Acer Aspire 7551
AMD Phenom II X4 N970 Quad-Core Processor (2.2 GHz)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
4 GB DDR3 Memory Ram (3.75 useable)
64-Bit runnning Windows 7
What I've been trying to lead into mixed among all this rambling is what are your experiences in optimizing your PC for gaming, regardless of whether you have a low end rig or not, and NOT including upgrading hardware or just getting a brand new PC altogether, of course? As much as I'd like my problem resolved (I've already asked this question in forums more closely designed to help with these problems anyway) I'm more interested in the experiences people have doing this. This is the first time I've really tried to optimize a gaming experience. Most of my PC games don't require this much work to do this. I'm curious just how frustrating it might get for me the more I try and how well it's worked for some of you. For those with low end PCS who try to game anyway, what was the game you just couldn't do anything about without getting a better PC?