Greetings!

I have been reading a lot of post on these and other HOMM5 forums about people owning laptop systems containing the ATi Radeon Xpress M200 IGP, most often combined with a Turion 64 or Athlon 64 processor and about 1024 mb Ram.
In most cases the frustrated laptop owners with tears in their eyes asks the question: I love Homm5 more dearly than my own wife, why doesnt Homm5 love me? In other words, why does the game runs so terrible on my system?
Most of the time they get the answer that their systems just isnt not good enought.
Being one of the people using this kind of laptop myself and also a diehard HOMM fan I do have my doubts about the truth to this generic answer.
Although it is true that the ATi Radeon Xpress M200 is an IGP, it is a very powerfull one, and in the case of my version with 128 MB of dedicated memory and 128 of shared on a Turion based system. A card that handles almost all new games with ease (no kidding).
On Homm5 what we face is a game that on the lowest possible grafic settings (640x480, Very low, no eyecandies etc) gives us about 5-10 fps.
Now at these settings you have an game that looks far worse than HOMM4.
No, I think the reason why the game runs so terrible is because Nival for some reason has decided not to add this and other IGP to the list of supported graphics cards.
My estimate is that this will really hurt their sales since at the time of the games release a VERY large amount of laptops from different manufacturers all have the ATi Radeon Xpress M200 IGP. Among my friends there is at least two (not including myself) that cant buy the game for the exact same reason as myslef.
If I am a representative of the games targetgroup this would mean serveral million dollar in lost sales.

As a reference, my specs are:
Turion 64 ML-37, 1024 DRR Ram, ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M IGP 128MB DDR (dedicated)

/Cheers
Lilike

Yep man, well spoken.
Most new games run very decently on my laptop with the Xpress 200 card on medium/high settings in most cases.
Why HoMM 5 won't run decently is a big questionmark for me, especially if you look at the minimum game specs...

Like I said before, the real bottleneck on this card is its shader 2 support, but Heroes 5 can be run in Shader 1.x, so this card should be able to run the game on med/high settings...

I tried tweaking all kinds of settings in the INI file, but as you pointed out; even on lowest of all settings the game still runs ****.

One thing to be noted as well is that there doesn't seem to be too much FPS difference at all between the higher and lower display settings in-game.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Yskonyn23,

Hi all. I just want to give you my own experience with Heroes V and the ATI Xpress 200M(128 dedicated,3.2Ghz AMD,1gig ram).
I have turned the demo inside out and one funny thing I've noticed is that no matter the resolution or detail level, the game runs almost equal on all settings. And when you start a new game first the game runs slow as h*ll but if you change the resolution or detail level in game then suddenly the game runs fine (And it doesn't matter if you change to High detail from very low, it will still run good after the change). But as soon as you move your horse the game starts to go slow again. I have also seen that when in battle the game CAN run smooth but I have only seen this once and that was when I "tabbed" out of the game and back into it. I really hope that a patch will come very soon and fix this issues 'cause I'm convinced that that ATi Radeon Xpress 200m(128mb dedicated) can run this game..

Yep Muukie, some weird things going on between this videoboard and the game
I think they're in love afterall, but the thing is; the game is still in denial!

Oh, there should be no problems for graphics chip to run the game...The problem lies in that there's not enough RAM methinks.

It runs perfectly smooth on my rig with a 6800GS and 2 GB RAM while it lags on my friends PC who has a 7800GS and 1 GB RAM.

*Sigh* Now I wish it could run as well on the lowest settings my laptop which has a Radeon Xpress M200 with 512 MB RAM, since it's a pain in the ass to upgrade the RAM on my laptop...

encountered the very same problem.. my computer runs all latest games excellently, but trying to play homm5 with my radeon xpress 200m is pure impossibility. lucky you if you have managed to get 10fps out of it.

bought the game and i am very disappointed. guess it's time to go and get the refunds.

My friend pointed out that HoMM V doesn't have any LOD...That might be what's killing the systems...

*Sigh* I hope they adress the problem, since the Radeon Xpress M200 is a decent graphics chip for laptops.

I'm hoping they fix the problem too, I have the same video card and it's the only game of mine that runs like ****, but I can play games like FEAR and Half-Life 2 without any problems or choppiness.

Now why exactly did Nival not support a certain amount of video cards exactly? I'm hoping for a solution as well...

I totally agree. I have posted about the Xpress on this forum, and I am really gutted due to the fact that I already bought the game.
I really do hope they patch it in someway, while I advised 2 friends of mine (also with 200M cards) not buying the game just yet.

Furthermore I would like to point out that I also totally agree with Erize665's remark about the loss of sales.

Regards,

Low

I don't believe it's a RAM issue. If that would be the case you would see the harddisk going crazy while playing the game due to paging...

It's the videocard for sure, but why is a big questionmark...

Same problem here, and I can't buy the game because of it.

I think it's a weird (dumb) choice to not include support of this videocard when laptops now outsell desktops, and this is a very common card in laptops.

I hope that they support this card soon. Me and a host of friends that have bought the HOMM series are not going to buy this one until it is supported on our ATI 200M cards. I tried to help during the beta and demo stages of the game telling them that it wasn't working well but there was no reply then and still isn't now of them working on fixing the problem. Hopefully with this dedicated question of multiple users having the problem they will fix it so it will work on these laptops. Once they do, they will get a ton of money from these users who won't buy the game until the ATI Radeon Xpress 200M card is supported.

Yep, I'm in the same boat but I don't have a laptop. I have a dual AMD 4200+ with 2 GB of RAM and the demo runs super slow no matter the settings. It's a real bummer that I have to take out my existing ATI Xpress 200 to spend another $100 on a new video card.

that's what i've been wondering about too.. why don't we get any kind of answer despite of many many posts are they even going to release a patch?

Well add me to the list of disgruntled HOMM fans.

What sense does it make to create a game that doesn't work on so many systems? I bought a brand new laptop just a month ago with the ATI 200M Radeon Xpress card and thought for sure that I would be able to run any kind of game I wanted.

Now looks like I'll be taking the game back.

bottom line is, the video and cpu share system resources. it will never be able to handle the 3d graphics as that of a stand alone video board sporting its own dedicated dram.
the system requirement state that the video card must have 64 mb ram....in the case of the integrated, it doesn't. it is leeching from the system ram, therefore putting it below system requirements.

quote:

Well add me to the list of disgruntled HOMM fans.

Add me too. It's very frustrating to know that you have a great video card, but the game isn't supported. Let's just hope for a patch that'll fix this problem.

bottom line is, the video and cpu share system resources. it will never be able to handle the 3d graphics as that of a stand alone video board sporting its own dedicated dram.
the system requirement state that the video card must have 64 mb ram....in the case of the integrated, it doesn't. it is leeching from the system ram, therefore putting it below system requirements

This card has a dedicated 128 MB of video RAM and does not share with the system. Even so, this 128 is double what is required. I can understand a bit of a lag, but not so much that the game is unplayable.

This isn't a shared memory vid card it is dedicated. If my Xpress 200 can run EVERQUEST 2 lag free on medium settings, GUILD WARS on high settings lag free, HALF LIFE 2 online no worries, and a host of other games (CIV 4, AoE 3) why in the H E double hockey sticks won't it run this? This card was the norm vid card in 'affordable' laptop solutions for the last 6months to a year and works on every other high end game I know of yet HOMM5 won't. THey need a fix like ASAP...

So has _anyone_ made it work at a playable FPS?

I even screwed around with the omega drivers, to no avail... *sigh* No one?