Hi All,

I've just purchased the Witcher and the autoconfiguration is setting my graphic quality to lowest.
I just wanted to understand if it is the overall system or if a new graphic card could help out.
I have WinXP Home, service pack 3. 2 giga ram.
Computer is
Intel Core i3 CPU 550@3.20 GHZ
Video Card is Ati Radeon 4800 series (can't really remember which one :p)
Also every now and then I get an error message saying that My Graphic Accelerator has been reset. The game doesn't stop it just goes to desktop and then I can continue playing.
I have the latest drivers for the Graphic Card and updated the Witcher.

Cheers!

Hmm.
It could be a slew of different issues, but if I had to bet on something (without any testing), I'd say your power supply may not be supplying enough juice to your video card.

Your system looks pretty balanced to me. A dual core cpu with a good graphic card from the last generation. Memory could be doubled even with these components, but it's still overall fitting.

So I'd say it's the overall system. But I suggest not to rely on the automatic configuration. "Middle" should be running okay, too. Again, the system memory could be the culprit here, but test it first, upgrade later. ;)

Oh and another tipp: The game depends on a strong cpu. Upgrading the graphic card but keeping the dual core cou wouldn't do much. So again, you would've to upgrade the overall system for a general performance boost.


About the driver resetting issue: To be honest I ran into the same problem with the same graphic card. For me the 4800 series was not a good generation and I switched to Nvidia a couple of weeks later. Now I'm using a HD 5850 again and don't have any problem at all.

It could also be the operating system. Even your system should be good enough to run Windows 7 without any problem. You probably wont even notice a performance drop. And it by far the much more stable system, both on his own and with graphic drivers. Believe me, it's a huge difference!

Given your amount of RAM I recommend using your task manager to kill any unneeded processes prior to opening the game. I find that TW 2 eats about 1.5 gig of RAM on it's own without taking into account what windows and everything else running needs. Try Task killing all the unneeded stuff as a test to see if that helps. If it does add a stick or 2 of RAM.

I misread his RAM line at first. Yes, 2GB is not enough; the game will want that much for itself. Upgrade to 4GB. Clean booting or at least killing off everything in the background that you can safely kill off is still a good idea.

You're getting errors from the GPU or its drivers. AMD drivers try to do a reset when that happens; sometimes they're successful, and you get the minimize but can restore successfully. I've suspected but never proven that some of these come from background stuff like Skype that tries to pop up messages during the game.

XP Home sometimes has performance issues (related to power management) on multi-core CPUs. See KB909944 for possible solutions (particularly, avoiding the "Minimal Power Management" power scheme).

So that's an AMD thing. Good to know. I usually use intel myself so I would not have caught that. Never had the misfortune of trying to run multicore on a xp machine, most of us gamers avoid the mnimal power scheme like the plague though. Always good to check though.