flat bobcat
To establish a baseline do you have the last driver released for the gma 3000?
Also is your laptop using the performance power plan for being plugged in on the intel graphics control panel and any other places you might be able to set it?
Do you get a sizable increase in performance when you lower resolution in the game?
flat bobcat
In that case have you already gone through Windows optimizations and verified the CPU isn't thermal throttling at all? 2330 is quite old but I'm thinking it can do better than sub 30 fps.
Did you already do a cleanup and install the most recent mastercomfig? Verifying things like multithreading isn't being turned off from old config files is a good idea.
Any mods/custom files? If applicable, take any out and test performance then add back one at a time, although unlikely its the cause of poor performance in casual.
hybrid shoalBOT
@fickle narwhal has leveled up! (0 ➜ 1)
flat bobcat
Does your task manager show any constant and or intermitten spikes in background CPU usage?
radiant fractal
It is a 2c4t 2.2GHz CPU from over a decade ago. I wouldn't say 30-40fps isn't too far out of range for what would be expected.
flat bobcat
I've seen lower clocked sandy bridge CPU's handle the game a lot better than that, so I don't think 40 fps is the max you can get from low preset dx8
radiant fractal
With a total of 4GB RAM that's going to be split between the system and GPU as well? And how many cores/threads?
flat bobcat
Yes, it's also not going to be split, the iGPU is only going to have a small amount dedicated to it, can be user configurable.
1 core only, 2 cores, and 2c/4t are the situations I've seen where TF2 was just sorta hovering at 60 fps when using "potato" configs of the day.
Main reason I asked for a lowering in resolution was because of a suspicion the relatively low power gpu using the system ram was the bottleneck, however it was reported as no change.
I don't have a sandy bridge on hand to test, however I've tested with an FX CPU before, which was very poor on IPC compared to sandy bridge. And 1.3Ghz 2 core was getting more than 60 fps in games at the time and handling TF2 more than adequately.
radiant fractal
That's still split even if it's not a 50/50 split. It's shared between system and GPU.
And when was "at the time"? Back then or now?
flat bobcat
And when was "at the time"? Back then or now?
Sandy bridge IPC hasn't changed since when it released to now so I'm not sure what you're asking.
radiant fractal
TF2 has changed since 2011.
flat bobcat
That's still split even if it's not a 50/50 split. It's shared between system an...
What are you proposing is being effected by the split?
If there's enough ram this shouldn't be an issue beyond the raw performance of the memory.
radiant fractal
4GB RAM is already cutting it close without having to use any of it for the GPU.
flat bobcat
Do you have testing for that with TF2 specifically?
radiant fractal
I've yet to see anyone coming in here getting great performance in any rig with only 4GB RAM, let alone a 10+ year old laptop that's probably got the OS gunked up from never being reinstalled.
flat bobcat
I'm just going to link the doc page for troubleshooting and hope some of it is helpful
The the cpu_frequency_monitoring convar
cpu_frequency_monitoring (and then a value that controls the amount of seconds between reports in console)
I wouldn't say so. Although there may be some room to reduce its footprint.
General windows optimizations should help
If you want to try almost everything there is to try, then I could suggest some things I personally use when "cleaning up" old PC's.