Laptop friendly?

[scintilion]

Has any consideration been given to making GC2 work well on battery powered laptops? Sure would be nice to play on those long flights to the Bahamas :-) (Never been there, but I've heard it's nice). I've never understood why all games spin the CPU continuously even when sitting idle. Thanks,
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scintilion

[Draginol]

Yep. In fact, our demo laptop is an IBM ThinkPad T40. My wife plays it on her ThinkPad R50.

I don't know how much CPU power it uses though, it's most GPU intensive.

[tetley]

I've never understood why all games spin the CPU continuously even when sitting idle.

All software nowadays has a Main Event Loop (MEL). It's constantly checking the keyboard & the mouse to see if something has happened. That's why the CPU is always crunching even when you're idling.

It would make a lot of sense if we designed CPU's (I say we, because that's what I do) to sit in "wait" mode until an interrupt (such as a mouse-click) came through, and then it could dispatch the next instruction depending on what kind of interrupt it is; all without skipping a beat. Alas, we're not quite there yet. We do have a "power-down" mode, where if nothing happens for some time, we go into standby mode, but that takes a lot of cycles, and software still has to have a MEL.

[scintilion]

Thanks for the info on the looping issue. I still don't understand why only games seem to keep the CPU going constantly, while most other software doesn't. Is there a practical way to use a game on battery power?

[tetley]

At Intel, you know what the #1 software program burning the most power was? "Edit". A simple DOS text editor. Just sitting there with the cursor blinking burned lots of CPU, waiting for a keystroke. We would run that program to test the CPU for overheating. Maybe Microsoft has done a lot of work optimizing the MEL since then, and programs operating off their SDK libraries use that. Games no doubt have to code their own MEL optimized for speed (not power).

[Colon™]

Originally posted by Draginol
Yep. In fact, our demo laptop is an IBM ThinkPad T40. My wife plays it on her ThinkPad R50.

I don't know how much CPU power it uses though, it's most GPU intensive.

So that means it runs smoothly on a ATI Mobility Radeon 9800, right? (just googled which video card the thinkpad T40 uses) That's good news for me.

[Maniac]

I have a ThinkPad R50e, without Transform & Lighting, I assume just like Draginol's wife.

Just to make sure; does that mean the game can be played without T&L??

[ajbera]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 1135-S125 with Intel Extreme Graphics 2 for mobile (Intel 82852/82855 chip with 64 MB vid mem). Don't think I have T&L. Other specs are 1.8 GHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM.

I'm interested in downloading the game, but don't want to waste the time & effort if it won't run well.

[Draginol]

If you're not sure, I'd suggest waiting for the demo.

[damunzy]

Works nicely on my work laptop: IBM Thinkpad T40. Pentium M 1.5 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500. I haven't gotten into anything graphicly intensive yet, but I will report back soon on how well it does on my 'real world' system - not a demo system with just the game installed.

[ajbera]

My laptop runs Civ4, post-patch, but v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, about 4-5 fps with plenty of HD chugging from virtual memory use. So sluggish I just uninstalled it as it's too aggravating to play at that speed. I'm tempted to download it, but I'd be pissed to waste that time if it didn't work (and the retailers out here *still* don't have it on the shelves yet.) Is GC2 less intensive than Civ4? Much less?

And, if I choose the download & get a hard copy version of GC2 from Stardock, are they slow in sending out the boxes? Do they just have one sent to me from Best Buy, or from their own warehouse? If I order today, will I be waiting 2 weeks for the game? (My PC should be coming soon, which will definitely play it.)

[RickyDMMontoya]

I run it on a Comaq with an Intel Athlon 3500, 1.45GHz, gig of ram, ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200, and it works just fine.

Still get the bugs that others have reported though...

[Daz]

I have a IBM Thinkpad R51.

It runs ok, with the usual bugs...

[PrinceBimz]

It works great on my laptop!

[Rustwork]

i couldn't run civ4. with new drivers i can run galciv2. ironically i bought civ4 on release at best buy. i took it back because it wouldn't run. they gave me store credit on a gift card, which i just used to buy galciv2. too bad take2. i have a three year old toshiba laptop with geforce4 420go - 32mb card. i don't have the ship textures, but this is a small loss. the game functions without a hitch.