Wonder How To: Dedicate RAM to a graphics card?

ok, update. just restarted to check on my BIOS, and the option to edit the NVIDEA graphics card field has been greyed out. does that mean it can be un-greyed somehow? also, I'm running windows 7. on startup, the first thing I see is Acer, Intel H20 inside. what does that Intel part mean anyways (another sub-question)?

That means you can't overclock it, most laptops this is true for as it would kill your laptop with the overheat or with the surge in power. Also don't underestimate the power of that card, I have one in my current laptop that is running first-gen i5-460m and the card is the exact same one as yours (NVIDIA GeForce GT 420m, 1gb VRAM). The Intel part of the bios just means that Intel most likely created the bios or it is using an Intel chipset (Most likely both).

To my knowledge you can only dedicate another 256 to 512mb of ram. I've never done this, but I am assuming this is to facilitate worst-case scenarios and not to increase performance. Which it wouldn't do anyway..

Your best bet without spending money is to overclock the card slightly if this is possible. If you have decent GPU cooling this should not be an issue. Overclocking is the easiest and most cost-effective method of squeezing out more bang for your buck so to speak. If done correctly that is. :)

I currently have a GTX560-TI running at 970mhz (850 stock).

Then again, most laptop gpu's don't have the overclock facility... Purely because laptop airflow is so bad to begin with. The extra heat would kill it quicker

QUOTED:"Total War: Shogun 2, it fails in the area of graphics. As a side note, will running DirectX 11 make things better or worse in the processing department?"

Apparently Shogun II needs something like GTX400 card (i dont know the mobile equivalent). Does not seem to be very demanding. My suggestion would be to update your drivers (would be surprised how this helps sometimes) and decrease some of the visuals to help with lag & etc...

If you're struggling with Skyrim for example, there's a D3D9.dll mod which decreases the load on the gpu resulting in higher framerates. Worth checking if something like that is available for shogun.

As for the other question DX11 is more demanding than DX9 for example, it uses improved versions of shaders, supports things like tasselation and so on. Take Civilization 5 for example, for PC's that cannot handle it, the game automatically recommends DX9 whereas for high end machines it defaults to DX11.

Try going here and seeing if your computer can handle it, it will also give you a report on what needs to be updated to make things run, Skyrim can be played on Ultra FPS mode fine with that GPU, you may also try Game Booster to help as well.

very interesting fellas. i do have an external fan that i could put under the laptop to take care of the heat (i have seen a liquid cooled alienware laptop once). as for the drivers, i did happen to update them, and it seemed to help a ton. Shogun 2 is running at medium setting across the board. i find it sad though, that i cannot changed the greyed out area in the bios. a problem i'm commonly finding is that my first gen i-3 processor is just not cutting it. what is the difference between the first and second gen processors? thanks for the help.

I would be inclined to say it's not the CPU but the GPU slowing you down. Then again without physically looking at it (or running some tests) i cannot say for sure. 

Second gen are the sandy bridge CPU's, they're devilishly fast and rather recent. However they are 30% slower than say... Ivy bridge which is the newest generation released by intel.

To give you an idea, the i3 sandy has a whole different architecture therefore it can easily outperform the 1st gen i3 processor even while running on a lower frequency. 

But, still, I think your bottleneck might be the video card. I suppose the best way to check is to set everything to low and enter a battle with as many actors in the scene as possible, the number of computations in the CPU will increase and if you experience severe lag with lowest possible settings, then it will indicate your cpu can't handle it and gpu is contributing. if it runs smoothly, then the gpu is the culprit.

alright i'll give it a shot. and while we are on the subject of steam games, I don't have the internet at my house (sob&weap) and sometimes, when i restart my laptop, steam often times gives me the option to start my games without any fuss, but more often then not, it will goof up and when i go into "start in offline mode", it will give me a funky message that says that it can't connect to the steam network. if i press "start in offline mode", shouldn't it start that way and not give me a message like that? I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the credentials or something like that. any remedy for my offline woes?

Steam?

Not the man to speak to about steam 

oh well, thanks for the tips