Crash when loading for the first city

[athas]

Crash when loading for the first city

I completed what I assume is the prologue, but after watching the funeral cutscene (or skipping it), during loading for the city, the game crashes with an illegal action. I have a Core 2 Duo system with a Radeon x1400 graphics card (newest Omega drivers) running Windows XP, the only potentially unusual thing about my setup being that I have the game installed on an external (USB) disk, but I can't imagine that this could cause a crash.I even tried reloading a slightly earlier save, and playing from then, but the game still crashes. I have uninstalled Daemon Tools (though I find it odd that I have to) and installed all the Windows updates I could find.Can anyone think of other things to try?

 

[Licaon_Kter]

your video card is below game specs

 

[athas]

your video card is below game specs

Well, this wasn't really explicitly stated anywhere (due to Ati's great idea about having mobile chips a separate line?). I also find it a bit weird that I can run the game fairly well until that load - isn't there some hack I can apply to force it through? What exactly is going wrong? I also found a few references that suggests other people have been able to run it with an X1400.

 

[username_2067007]

your video card is below game specs

Well, this wasn't really explicitly stated anywhere (due to Ati's great idea about having mobile chips a separate line?). I also find it a bit weird that I can run the game fairly well until that load - isn't there some hack I can apply to force it through? What exactly is going wrong? I also found a few references that suggests other people have been able to run it with an X1400.

I'm sure that no one at all can fathom what you mean by "not explicitly stated", since the minimum is very clearly a radeon 9800 (see the "800" there?), and the least powerful gaming capable video cards are at the "600" level among more recent cards (X1650). Generally speaking, however, almost none of the higher performance games, including The Witcher, offer support for laptop PCs, period. However, your point about the cause of the particular crash you experienced is well taken. My question in response is what settings are you expecting a crap card like an X1400 to meet? The default for The Witcher is High Quality settings, and your VGA is sub-minimum, so you should have reset everythng to the lowest settings and the lowest resolution. If your display has a default high resolution, you will be SOL.

 

[athas]

your video card is below game specs

Well, this wasn't really explicitly stated anywhere (due to Ati's great idea about having mobile chips a separate line?). I also find it a bit weird that I can run the game fairly well until that load - isn't there some hack I can apply to force it through? What exactly is going wrong? I also found a few references that suggests other people have been able to run it with an X1400.

I'm sure that no one at all can fathom what you mean by "not explicitly stated", since the minimum is very clearly a radeon 9800 (see the "800" there?), and the least powerful gaming capable video cards are at the "600" level among more recent cards (X1650). Generally speaking, however, almost none of the higher performance games, including The Witcher, offer support for laptop PCs, period.

Well, I could not see any specific extensions supported by the 9800 series not supported by the 1400 (mostly, I just couldn't see where the mobile line fitted in with the mainline Radeon cards), just an overall lower performance. While I can't claim great experience with GPU programming, my experience from programming other processors have been that only the lack of specific extensions cause total failure, while slower performance results in just that - slower (or "unusable") software performance. I may be mistaken here. I don't really understand why a game needs to support laptops specifically... apart from special 3D accelerators and weirdo power management, aren't they just slow standard PCs these days?

However, your point about the cause of the particular crash you experienced is well taken. My question in response is what settings are you expecting a crap card like an X1400 to meet? The default for The Witcher is High Quality settings, and your VGA is sub-minimum, so you should have reset everythng to the lowest settings and the lowest resolution. If your display has a default high resolution, you will be SOL.

I expect it to run the game at ~20 fps or so at the lowest settings most of the time. I realise the machine is no gaming system (nor was it designed to be anyway), but it has been able to at least start most games during the last year, and run most of them at fair speed.