Games won't recognize APU graphics

[headless97]

I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with the AMD A8-4500M APU. Reviews and benchmarks gave this processor considerably high marks, especially for the price that I got it at ($380). It's been pretty good so far, but I tried to play the bullet-hell game Jamestown on it and was getting considerable lag. I know the game has to draw a lot but there is no way that Jamestown is more graphically demanding than say, Serious Sam HD.

Do you have any idea why this is happening and what I can do about it?

 

[rds1220]

I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with the AMD A8-4500M APU. Reviews and benchmarks gave this processor considerably high marks, especially for the price that I got it at ($380). It's been pretty good so far, but I tried to play the bullet-hell game Jamestown on it and was getting considerable lag. I know the game has to draw a lot but there is no way that Jamestown is more graphically demanding than say, Serious Sam HD.

Do you have any idea why this is happening and what I can do about it?

What are the game settings set at? What is the resolution of your laptop LCD screen?

 

[k1114]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/ Here's the steam page for those that don't know what it is. It is a rather old game ported to the pc. Everything just gets bigger with a bigger res so I don't think res makes a difference. Check you cpu usage, gpu usage, even temps. If this is fine could just be a driver issue. It is an opengl game though and my guess is it's single threaded. The cpu should be powerful enough, but piledriver does suffer in single threaded performance.

 

[NoUserBar]

Since it's a laptop it could be overheating, and throttling maybe. Whats the temps? I know he said that, but if it's hot enough to throttle, then a efficient laptop cooling pad (that actually works) could help.

 

[headless97]

My laptop resolution is 1366x768, but the game expands the image to fit the full screen so the game might run at 720p. There are no graphics options to speak of.

The game lags the moment I start it up, even in the menus before the game. Processor stays between 30-41% usage and reached 50 deg C after 2 minutes playing. Booted at 46C so I don't think temp is the problem.

Also, I used Speccy and Advanced SystemCare 6 to get temp and usage. Sorry this took a while to respond to but I was having issues with TomsHardware forums not displaying text.

 

[jaguarskx]

Try running the game in Win XP SP2 or SP3 mode.

 

[k1114]

I was hoping you would look at per core usage.

 

[headless97]

I thought that Jamestown was somehow not detecting the graphics processor on the APU. It turns out that I was digging for information in the wrong direction based on some preconceived fear. I did some other Google searches and found that Jamestown has issues with some laptop hardware, which worried me, but people had a solution: set the Jamestown process to work across all cores and it runs smoothly. Sorry for the false alarm. I just prefer Tom's Hardware forums to Steam forums...