I posted this on the Thief board but got no reply. I'm eager for a solution so I decided to post it here too. I apologize if I shouldn't have.

Hi there. I bought Thief 3 while it was on promo and tried it last night. It runs but the gameplay is very choppy and the framerate is low. I don't really understand why this is happening considering the laptop I was playing on surpass the requirements of the game.

Laptop specs:

Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit
1.8Ghz dual-core Athlon
256MB Geforce 7000M
2GB RAM

Is there anyway I can fix this problem? I really want to play this game. Thanks.

Unfortunately, that graphics card is terrible.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+7000M+%2F+nForce+610M

Basically with Nvidia cards, from 0-4 (in your case 7000 to 7400) they are low spec, 7500 to 7600 would be medium range and 7700 to 7900 would be high end.

Also, mobile versions of graphics cards are weaker than their desktop versions.

Don't give up. If you don't get a reply here, send Support a message. :)

EDIT: Ninja'd.

At the risk of turning a specific-problem thread into a general-problem thread, I do have to say that there is little incentive to post in the game-specific forums. They are extremely sparsely populated and people with solutions will generally have no interest in visiting them, only people with problems.

So it's no wonder that people turn to the General forum. How many people here who gave legitimate answers actually would have thought to look in the Thief forums?

Hell, it took three months before anyone replied to my Atlantis 2 question.

Sorry if posting this here has caused a problem. :(

A small update on the situation: I just installed the game on my 1.6Ghz Atom, 128MB Intel graphics, 1GB RAM netbook and guess what? It runs better on my netbook than it does on my laptop! Which is ridiculous.

It also supports what gameon said about my laptop's hardware (graphics card) being at fault. So there is nothing I can do to fix this problem in terms of software?

Is it playable on the netbook? Why not play it on that?

All you can do is update the graphics card drivers, and set everything to low settings in the Thief game itself.

I remember there being a mod to downgrade graphics in oblivion called "oldblivion" but i think that is a rare thing. I doubt there is anything similar for Thief 3.

A rule of thumb: minimum requirements isn't a measure for playability but that the game "works", like you can start it up.

My tips: don't bother with minimum, look for recommended instead.

Another one when it comes to laptops/notebooks: ALWAYS check how powerful the bizarre GPU is because they have ridiculous names. For instance, yours is a class 5 out of 6 where class 1 is high-end.

If you still want to try you could always try and mess around with ini/cfg/xml files and lower everything beyond what's possible in-game, could help as long as your card supports the required shader model (yours has 3.0, Thief 3 requires 1.1).