Playing on a laptop? Integrated Graphics Card Magicka F.A.Q.

[Paradox__rep]

Integrated graphic cards FAQ

Q: Why a FAQ?
A: We're getting lots of questions about integrated graphic processors (IGP henceforth) and requests to add support for them.


Q: Why cant I play Magicka on my laptop?
A: Most likely because Your IGP isn't good enough to run Magicka. Very few IGPs are good enough. Especially Intel Graphics Cards have very poor performance and can't handle Magicka.

Take another close look at the minimum requirements regarding graphic cards:

• Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon® X1900

Q: But my IGP should be able to run the game!
A:Remember that laptop versions of graphic cards have noticeably worse performance than non-mobile ones. A 8800M is NOT as good as a regular 8800.


Q: But I can can run Starcraft 2! Why not a little game like Magicka?
A: The fine folks at blizzard have dozens and dozens of engineers who've consciously made the effort to optimize the game to run on low end machines.

The arrowhead team, while also fine, consist of 7 developers. Of which 2 are programmers.

When the choice came between additional gameplay features and optimize performance on IGP's we chose the former.

What would you have chosen in our position?


Q: But I can play Crysis with this IGP! Why not Magicka?
A: Again, Crytek probably have even more engineers working on the engine than SC2.

Q: Does this mean you'll never support IGP's?
A: Once the major patching is out of the way (hopefully soon) we'll focus more on adding new feature/polish and of course more content! We will do additional optimization, but the fact still remains that we prefer to create new fun content than to do time consuming optimization. So we can't promise or commit to anything, but we'll look into it.


Q: Aaawww man, that blows.
A: We're very sorry, but the simple fact is that generally speaking IGP's aren't great for gaming.


Let us know if you have any more questions and we'll update the thread.

Sincerely,

/ The Paradox & Arrowhead team

Ok, we understand!! the game runs at 30 fps on my laptop at 800*600 res.... it has an intel T4400 2.20 GHz, with a radeon hd mobility 4500 series, and 4gb of ram. it runs really slow at max resolution....

well, i'm not giving up the hope of someday being able to play magicka on my laptop. but you're right, i would've done the same thing in your position. keep up the good work!

[Feynt]

Hopefully the 100+ post thread will die with this in place. I disagree with the stance that time consuming optimization is less important than new content. Shi...stuff that works is better than lots of stuff. While I still don't expect Intel graphics support, as a team investing so much into an engine of their own one would hope you would find it important to optimize it for future use. You can't keep remaking your engine from the ground up every time.

[ItzzNinja]

Originally Posted by Feynt

Hopefully the 100+ post thread will die with this in place. I disagree with the stance that time consuming optimization is less important than new content. Shi...stuff that works is better than lots of stuff. While I still don't expect Intel graphics support, as a team investing so much into an engine of their own one would hope you would find it important to optimize it for future use. You can't keep remaking your engine from the ground up every time.

I don't expect Intel onboard support either, just better support of onboard AMD or nVidia chips like the Mobility Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx series and all onboard Geforce G/GT/GTX series chips.

[J Ranger]

Originally Posted by ItzzNinja

I don't expect Intel onboard support either, just better support of onboard AMD or nVidia chips like the Mobility Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx series and all onboard Geforce G/GT/GTX series chips.

^This^

Valve has done a lot of work with smaller dev teams as well and all of their results atleast included the ability for the end-user to Optimize the bells and whistles that were bogging down performance. There's no excuse for an IGP / APU's backed by a 3 GHZ dualcore to peak 120 FPS on Source Engine & Unreal3 but only average 5fps on Magicka. The disparity there goes far beyond hardware support...

To Paradox: Could you consider giving us a Configurator or some -commands that disable these incompatible shaders & GPU hogging particles? ...Or atleast give us more technical info on what to Force/Disable as possible work-arounds?

[Armor_Biff]

Originally Posted by J Ranger

To Paradox: Could you consider giving us a Configurator or some -commands that disable these incompatible shaders & GPU hogging particles? ...Or atleast give us more technical info on what to Force/Disable as possible work-arounds?

Yeah, I would like to know this as well. I have a Radeon HD 4650 (yeah I know, cheap card but still better than integrated), and only get 30 fps at 800x600 resolution. Not to mention the stuttering...

[Feynt]

Originally Posted by ItzzNinja

I don't expect Intel onboard support either, just better support of onboard AMD or nVidia chips like the Mobility Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx series and all onboard Geforce G/GT/GTX series chips.

Well in THIS case, I would agree. An integrated chipset from nVidia or ATi should be at least capable of running the game. I believe the fear is that all integrated graphics chipsets are similar to Intel, which is patently false. They're all slower than dedicated chipsets, but those of nVidia and ATi should be fully compatable with any shader model they say they support.

[Chinoman10]

Originally Posted by Feynt

Hopefully the 100+ post thread will die with this in place. I disagree with the stance that time consuming optimization is less important than new content. Shi...stuff that works is better than lots of stuff. While I still don't expect Intel graphics support, as a team investing so much into an engine of their own one would hope you would find it important to optimize it for future use. You can't keep remaking your engine from the ground up every time.

I know it's a bit off-topic... But as you can see, the world is filled with people who disagree about you on the "stuff that works is better than lots of stuff"... Not because of the game (because the world doesn't play this game >_>) but because of the off-topic I'll say next:

If you're minimally informed about cellphones, you should've heard about the super hyper mega iPhone 4, that it can NOW do stuff that previous one COULDN'T do! But people are happy that the iPhone 3 (or 2) can copy/paste while the 1st couldn't! When I first saw that "awesome news" I was like: "...it couldn't do it? D:"

Now, to the part where I was going to talk about good stuff and lots of stuff...

Symbian/Ovi Store vs iOS Store (can't remember the name >_>)

Symbian has 10 to 20 (I really can't remember, but I think the number is bigger) times less applications than the Apple store... And now, people will look at this stats and say "oh hell! I love applications! I'll pick an iPhone right now!"

BUT! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean Better! But now you ask... How do you prove that OVI store is better?

Again, the stats speak for themselves: OVI Store downloads per hour are 100 times bigger than Apples... Want to know why? Apple store is filled with ridiculous stuff that do practically the same! While on OVI Store you don't see people imitating applications from one-another... So people can download the one they want, instead of "this is looks better... but... this one has more features...ummmm?!?!?!?" get it?...

Honestly? I couldn't care less about the performance... My NVidia GTX 260 runs @ 1650x1080 res with max gfx without any slow downs, even with massive AoE spells... But my laptop does slow down a lot D: and I need to play on windowed 800x600 lol... Still sucks to play on a laptop without a mouse (physical mouse... not mouse-pad)...but you can manage it... I guess... I just need to change the self-cast to TAB instead of middle button that doesn't exist on the mouse-pad (lol)...

Ah well, I'm again writing a wall of text instead of trying to fix my Magicka... I guess I'll see you guys around!

Later,
Chinoman10.

Note: In case you're wondering about the crash, check the "Game crashes since patch" or something thread that I made...

Originally Posted by Chinoman10

I know it's a bit off-topic...
Symbian has 10 to 20 (I really can't remember, but I think the number is bigger) times less applications than the Apple store... And now, people will look at this stats and say "oh hell! I love applications! I'll pick an iPhone right now!"

BUT! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean Better! But now you ask... How do you prove that OVI store is better?

Again, the stats speak for themselves: OVI Store downloads per hour are 100 times bigger than Apples... Want to know why? Apple store is filled with ridiculous stuff that do practically the same! While on OVI Store you don't see people imitating applications from one-another... So people can download the one they want, instead of "this is looks better... but... this one has more features...ummmm?!?!?!?" get it?...

I own a Nokia and it's the biggest POS I've used- Phone and OS. The OVI store is soo bad that I've only found two apps from it, both useless, because NOTHING is worth a damn there. Even the comments are useless.

Here is a link to Opera 10 (web browser) reviews. See for yourself if you can find a single useful review in this disaster.

http://store.ovi.com/content/20975?c...gment=1&page=1

The OVI store is total garbage! If it weren't for the built-in GPS/maps on this phone I'd have chucked it without hesitation.

Even the GPS consistently gives directions so out of the way that it's never worth following. The saving grace is that the map is always there regardless of connectivity.

<Own a laptop with an ATI Mobililty Radeon HD 3650

To people saying that the reason Magicka won't work on mobile GPUs / has a high GPU requirement is because of XNA/.net: You're wrong.

The language your game is written in doesn't affect your graphics performance. If the language/graphics API sucks then it can affect the performance of the CPU thread that's issuing the render commands, but it won't make your GPU any slower. If Magicka had been written in C++, still using DX9/SM3, it would have the exact same GPU requirements.

Big budget games run well on crap GPUs for two main reasons:
1: they're cross-platform with games consoles, which have crap GPUs these days (the PS3 is a geForce 7800, which is less than half the performance of the 8800 that is Magicka's minimum requirement).
2: They're built on top of an older engine, itself built on top of an older engine, from the time of GPU dinosaurs. This means they both have the code for things like shader-less rendering already, and they have many many many years of optimisations to make them run fast.

[D3xter]

Originally Posted by Thief^

To people saying that the reason Magicka won't work on mobile GPUs / has a high GPU requirement is because of XNA/.net: You're wrong.

The language your game is written in doesn't affect your graphics performance. If the language/graphics API sucks then it can affect the performance of the CPU thread that's issuing the render commands, but it won't make your GPU any slower. If Magicka had been written in C++, still using DX9/SM3, it would have the exact same GPU requirements.

Big budget games run well on crap GPUs for two main reasons:
1: they're cross-platform with games consoles, which have crap GPUs these days (the PS3 is a geForce 7800, which is less than half the performance of the 8800 that is Magicka's minimum requirement).
2: They're built on top of an older engine, itself built on top of an older engine, from the time of GPU dinosaurs. This means they both have the code for things like shader-less rendering already, and they have many many many years of optimisations to make them run fast.

http://www.xnawiki.com/index.php?[color="#FF66FF"]♥[/color][color="#FF66FF"]♥[/color][color="#FF66FF"]♥[/color]..._compatibility

Cards That Do NOT Work
NVIDIA
GeForce
GeForce 4 (SM2)
GeForce4 MX 4000
Based on GeForce2; does not actually support SM2.
Intel
GMA series
GMA 900
XNA apps crash on startup.
GMA 950
XNA apps crash on startup.
GMA 4500MHD (SM4)
Supports SM4.0 but performance is very poor.

[LightOfDarkness]

IGP support shouldn't be a priority, since IGPs aren't really meant for gaming in the first place. I do think that additional content should be as bug-free as possible at release though *cough*VALVe*cough*TF2

[anbu15]

understandable, but if you do do the optimization please add a AA/vsync option (if it is already auto enabled that is) that will make speed 2 times better.

Originally Posted by LightOfDarkness

IGP support shouldn't be a priority, since IGPs aren't really meant for gaming in the first place. I do think that additional content should be as bug-free as possible at release though *cough*VALVe*cough*TF2

they're not meant for gaming but they can do gaming. (batman AA, almost any unreal engine game, amnesia the dark descent, any source engine game, crysis, etc) can all run at 20-30+ frames on my 4200 if i tweak the settings. but i do understand that paradox is a small group and might not be able to do this but it just sucks because i really like this game.

[ItzzNinja]

Originally Posted by anbu15

understandable, but if you do do the optimization please add a AA/vsync option (if it is already auto enabled that is) that will make speed 2 times better.


they're not meant for gaming but they can do gaming. (batman AA, almost any unreal engine game, amnesia the dark descent, any source engine game, crysis, etc) can all run at 20-30+ frames on my 4200 if i tweak the settings. but i do understand that paradox is a small group and might not be able to do this but it just sucks because i really like this game.

You're absolutely correct -- while not meant for it, IGP chips can play many modern games!

I can list off a few myself:

Oblivion, Unreal Engine games, C4 games, Source anything, CryENGINE 3 games (Crysis, etc), XreaL-based games (these are very intensive), many XNA games (which is why when I saw the demo running slow on my 4200 I was like "???"), id Tech 4 games (I wouldn't be surprised if Black Ops could run on this machine), the list goes on and on...

Don't associate IGP chips with little ability to play games, because it has been proven time and time again that it is perfectly doable.