[THE Phreak]

It lags incredibly, memory wise,  on this computer. I'm on 256mb with onboard gr4fx, and the memory lag alone makes it all unplayable.

The computer was free,so I'm not complaining. 

[Mars]

Seems to me you just did 

A lot of people have this problem actually.

[THE Phreak]

I'm just fortunate I didn't have to pay for it.

[Mars]

Chances are that if you get a cheap PCI graphics card and some more memory, you have a shot of running fs2_open, though I'd need some more specs to be sure.

[THE Phreak]

Celeron 2.93ghz
248mb of ram
integrated graphics.

[Tolwyn]

I can run WCS on Sony TR2A notebook. Specs are 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, integrated graphics. So, first of all, you need more RAM. That should do the trick

[Wobble73]

I've seen SCP run on a comp with a 500mhz chip, 256 mb of ram and a 64mb graphics card, so it is possible! Granted a few of the graphics intensive stuff was switched off but it ran with very little lag after it was set up right.   

[THE Phreak]

I've had luck playing FS_port, but that was after ending every other task.

[Macfie]

I ran the SCP on a Pentium 3 with a 500MHz processor and 256MB of ram.  what really affects your ability to run the SCP is the video card.  I ran it with a 128MB video card.  The better the card the less problems you will have.

[MP-Ryan]

Seriously... go spend $30 on an AGP or PCI video card, that's all you need.  I ran this game on a GF2 MX400 32 MB card for some time.  Even now, I've only got an ATI 9500Pro in this system.

[neoterran]

248mb of ram

The graphics card is using shared memory but only seems to be allocating 16 MB of memory to the card, see if you can bump that up to 64 MB in the BIOS, minimum.

Those are pretty crap specs to run a 3D game, but you might be able to do it if you add more memory and adjust the integrated card's settings, and dont' run the adv_effects at all.

[phreak]

you'll probably need to ditch the media vps in order for it to run.

[neoterran]

lol, phreak and THE Phreak. that's gonna be confusing.

[Charismatic]

I feel for ya. Im not sure my labtop will handel SCP either.

[MP-Ryan]

248mb of ram

The graphics card is using shared memory but only seems to be allocating 16 MB of memory to the card, see if you can bump that up to 64 MB in the BIOS, minimum.

Those are pretty crap specs to run a 3D game, but you might be able to do it if you add more memory and adjust the integrated card's settings, and dont' run the adv_effects at all.

There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card, he would be able to run SCP with stable framerates quite easily.  No adveffects, but that's not an enormous sacrifice.

Good grief, it wouldn't be hard to pick up a video card that'll run SCP well for cheap:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&submitsearch=Search&satitle=%22geforce+4%22+ti4600&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D2&sadis=200&fpos=ZIP%2FPostal&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search
Ti4600 will run the SCP with no problems.  Radeon 9500Pro or 9700Pro is comparable.  Hell, you might be albe to find an old 9800Pro lying around for cheap, and it'll do everything you could ever want (from the system you have).  Newer nVidia FX cards are cheap, but they don't hold a candle to the slightly older high-performance cards.

Or, if he doesn't have an AGP port:  http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=108&subminorcatid=50 (those prices are CAD)

[neoterran]

There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card

Yeah. But he doesn't have a dedicated video card. He has an integrated Geforce4MX - that's a crappy Geforce2MX level 2 pixel pipeline processor with 64 bit memory bandwidth and 16 MB of slow DDR shared via UMA across the system bus.

[MP-Ryan]

There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card

Yeah. But he doesn't have a dedicated video card. He has an integrated Geforce4MX - that's a crappy Geforce2MX level 2 pixel pipeline processor with 64 bit memory bandwidth and 16 MB of slow DDR shared via UMA across the system bus.

Which is why I said he should cough up the $40 required to buy a decent video card that will play SCP, AND linked to a couple.

Hell, even an old GF2 MX400 card will run SCP better than integrated graphics.  Integrated is good for nothing but actually having a monitor attached to your PC.  And if his motherboard isn't a total piece of junk, it'll have an AGP slot.  Even if it IS a total piece of junk he'll have a PCI slot.

There comes a point where you can only milk so much from existing hardware.  This is not to say that you have to spend a fortune to upgrade your PC.  Even a brand-new high-end AGP card can be had for $150 or less (frequently much less).

[CP5670]

You don't even need to look on ebay, actually. This will allow ancient computers to run FSO pretty comfortably for $30.

[IceFire]

It lags incredibly, memory wise,  on this computer. I'm on 256mb with onboard gr4fx, and the memory lag alone makes it all unplayable.

The computer was free,so I'm not complaining. 

Are you using the Media VP's or just the stock game with SCP exe's?

[fsi.scsi]

SCP with mediavps runs fine on my PC after *major tweaking.*  I have a Toshiba laptop with a 2.8 GHz Celeron chip, 736 MB DDR RAM, and an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7000 IGP.  The major bottleneck for me may have been the front-side bus - Toshiba motherboards are crap.  

I did several things to try and lessen the lag - first, I disabled the major framerate decreasing options in SCP (i.e. specular, environment maps, etc.) and enabled img2dds, bitmap caching, and vsync disabling.  Then, I reflashed my BIOS and set my AGP aperture* to 64 MB (from 32 MB), which helped the performance somewhat.  You might have a lot of junk hogging up free memory, as I did, which severely restricts performance.  My solution was to restrict start-up and background programs as much as possible.  I also disabled a lot of unnecessary Windows services (XenTweak and Black Viper's WinXP Optimization Guide are very, very helpful and contain nifty tips/tricks)

I defragged my PC and generally cleaned stuff up that I didn't use.  I also increased the virtual memory a whole bunch.  Finally, I downloaded optimized Omega drivers for my video card and set specific OpenGL performance benchmarks for use with FSO (via the great ATI Tray Tools program by Ray Adams.)  

Final results: The average framerate increased by 20fps, and I got (as a bonus) 70MB of more free memory.  Hooray!... although  I try not to look at an Orion in-game.  Not because I'm intimidated by it or something, but because it slows down the game speed a hella lot.

*increasing the AGP aperture has been significantly tested and should boost in-game performance.  However, the ways by which you increase it may not always involve your BIOS -though they usually do.  I, for example, have a ****ty ACPI Toshiba BIOS that doesn't have the option to increase the aperture, so I had to do it thru ATI's SmartGart.

P.S. I would try and optimize your onboard graphics card's performace as much as possible.  What make is it again?
Look to http://www.driverheaven.net for more help.

EDIT: Links fixed