Some older games won't recognize my 3gb graphics card which is super annoying.

Ubersampling is an SSAA 4x pass, no laptop is capable of rendering that game smoothly at 4K effective resolution. The Witcher 2 is a fantastically put together piece of software from a performance standpoint.

Well good news is that the game nor your laptop are the problem. Ubersampling is what the trouble is. It's a completely useless feature where the only noticeable difference will be the drop in frame rate. So it'd be good if you got over that mental block that you need that feature turned on or else you're not running at max.

Here's an article about it with a mouse over image to compare.

http://solidlystated.com/software/the-witcher-2-ubersampling-comparison/

Yep, also the 680M's desktop equivalent is a GTX 570. From what I read people who ran witcher 2 with max settings (ubersampling turned on), had a dual or triple (not sure) GTX 570 SLI set-up around the time of release. My card which is a HD Radeon 7870 would bog down when I turn ubersampling on. Besides, there is no appreciable benefit to turn on ubersampling especially on a regular single screen, 1920x1080 setup even more so on a laptop since you can hardly notice it unless you really inspected it. The only way you can even appreciate ubersampling is if you played the game on a multi-monitor set up or on a very large screen, as @korwin pointed out.

hmm, i'm gonna sell my current laptop and get some money back to build a new desktop rig.

Next generation graphic and processor ?

i think the developer is issuing a "challenge" to those hardcoure pc building enthusiast. lol

Well I wasn't expecting that first post...

The real culprit is Saints Row 2, as several other people have said. The game doesn't run at the correct speed, my understanding being that the problem arises depending on the difference between your cpu clock speed and that of the 360 cpu. I think there might be an automated fix now, but when I played it, you needed to download a fix, a certain save game and get out a stopwatch and employ some maths in order to fix it. There was also a problem on Windows 7 where it wouldn't tell the system to free up any memory for it to use, which affected performance, obviously. There was also a bunch of other broken stuff like a motion blur graphical setting (one of two, for some reason) that turned geometry translucent. And on top of that, it just ran terribly.

I still racked up days of playtime though lololol

It's always a real bummer to not be able to enjoy a game fully because it just won't run well no matter what you do.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is very poorly optimised on the PC and it doesn't even look that great either. The STALKER games are a bit of a mess too; all of them stutter and hitch up as stuff gets streamed in. Assassin's Creed 3 was disappointing as well, especially considering how well Brotherhood and Revelations ran. And fucking GTAIV... What a goddamn trainwreck!

Unfortunately not every game can be Max Payne 3 or the most recent Devil May Cry. Those games run so well and look great on a huge range of hardware.

Did you play past the tutorial area? That area has some terrible lag issues. The rest of the game runs so much better.

Ubersampling is the sort of thing that's basically in there as a bit of an experiment. You pretty much have to run it on a custom cooled and overclocked desktop to run full speed with it on, and it really isn't worth the effort.

Generally, multiplatform releases get less optimized the older they are - this was the game industry realizing over the last two years that thanks to Steam (and gamers accepting its one-time activation DRM) the PC wasnt the pirate haven it used to be. Though generally, modern PCs simply brute force their way through older unoptomized ports through sheer processing power.

If you are planning to get an Intel processor, I think you would be fine with an Ivy Bridge processor unless you can wait awhile for Intel to bust out a few more Haswell CPUs in retail and then the prices of the Ivy Bridge processors might go down. Also Haswell uses a different socket. Do you have a current rig as a foundation?

GTA IV, The Sims 3, The Walking Dead, Dark Souls...In recent memory these are some of the most underperforming games I've played.

I'll give Metro 2033 a pass because that game at least looks incredible, so it makes sense why its hard to run perfectly. GTA IV is better now and runs DECENTLY on my PC now but it should be silky smooth with my hardware.

Laptops are never good enough. :c

GTA IV was pretty horrifically optimized for the PC. My modern PC, which can run Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 all on the maximum settings, struggles, really STRUGGLES to run GTA IV. I have no idea why. To this day it still has problems. It's the only video game which looks like absolute garbage on my PC.

It was just a terrible, terrible, terrible port. Having said that, Rockstar have gotten better at making ports - Max Payne 3 runs just fine on my computer (max settings).

Crysis 1 was never properly optimized well for the PC. It worked, it could look good, but it was poorly coded.

Haswell's main advantage over Ivy Bridge is the APU. If he can get an i5 3570K, that will be more than enough for at least two generations of Intel CPUs (Haswell and probably the next one). Intel CPUs seem to have reached a plateau in terms of performance since Sandy Bridge. Getting a newer GPU will make much more of difference than getting a new CPU.

As someone who came to PC gaming late last year it's interesting to see how hit or miss the port situation becomes when you start digging into the games catalogue pre 2012.

Mass Effect 3 (2012 release even) has a mind boggling lack of gamepad support (seriously Bioware wtf?) as well as Modern Warfare 3. At least the latter one can be fixed easily using Xpadder. GTA4 is kinda broken up to this day.

Seems like the idea of people hooking their PCs to their TVs and using their gamepads is a pretty recent discovery by game developers. Hopefully that trend continues.

Still, I'm a little worried of console to PC ports falling back into a dark era with the new generation around the corner.

Yep, I agree with your points. By the way, I thought APU was just a term that AMD (not Intel) coined for their CPUs that also have an integrated graphics core. If we go by that definition, aren't there Ivy Bridge processors that are "APU's" as well or were you just comparing Haswell's integrated graphics being better than Ivy Bridge? I think APU also does something else that is unique compared to Intel CPU's with integrated graphics but I can't seem to remember what it is ATM.

EDIT: Also I think Haswell has more benefits on mobile devices and not necessarily for the desktop market in terms of performance. The other advantage that Haswell DOES have over Ivy Bridge for the desktop is the lower power draw so it is more efficient in terms of power consumption. It is not by a great margin though but for those looking to upgrade from AMD CPU/APU (which are known to consume more power) to a current gen Intel CPU could also take that into consideration.

Want to know about a poorly optimized PC game? I bought Ghost Recon: Future Soldier this weekend cheap on Steam because I've always like the series and it just popped into my head after I finished Spec Ops: The Line which had been in my backlog for some time (yeah I know, wildly thematically different, but my brain latched on to the "military third person shooter" aspect)

I have yet to get it to run. As in, at all. No matter what I try all I get is a black screen. It doesn't even have the courtesy of outright crashing so I have to blindly kill it from the task manager after each failed attempt (and I do mean blindly since it doesn't even minimize on alt+tab or Winkey+D, at most I get a glimpse of the task bar) I've tried over a dozen proposed solutions. Nothing works. The only thing that is supposed to work is launching it in "Safe mode" from Uplay but that doesn't work because the option isn't even there for me - either an update of Uplay removed it completely or it isn't there because I'm running it through Steam. And to make it worse, this is clearly not a rare problem either - judging from forum posts there are tons of people with the exact same problem out there.

I even tried cracking it. Nothing. Black screen. At this point I've had to accept that there is literally nothing I can do and that somehow the game does not want to run on my hardware period.

If that's not as poorly optimized as it gets, I don't know what is.

AC1 was pretty bad on release. All the GTA games past 3 were pretty poorly optimized for PC. Wasn't Civ5 legendarily awful on release? Dark Souls was just a bad pc port, not sure it counts for 'bad optimization' because that would imply any optimization took place.

I didn't play more than a couple missions of 2033, I just assumed my machine at the time wasn't up to snuff. Sounds like that may have only been half the problem.

TW2's problem isn't that it's poorly optimized, it's just that it includes many graphics options that are extraneous and -in the case of Ubersampling- experimental. Ubersampling, from a technical standpoint is an insane and computationally expensive version of AA. It was seemingly built for future incarnations of GPUs where cards had plenty of juice to spare and could waste cycles on rendering frames multiple times to achieve the smoothest possible edges. Of course now FXAA has gotten a whole lot better and takes only a tiny fraction of the power.

yes. without ubersampling on, with ubersampling on, there is no way i can play past that. lol.

my current rig is a customizable laptop.

I do have a desktop rig but its part are outdated. I might as well change everything.

Processor

Intel® Core I5 760 2.8GHZ

Mainboard

MSI P-55 GD85

Graphics Card

HIS 5870 1GB iCooler V

Memory

Kingston 2GB DDR3 1333mhz x 2

Casing

Lancool K62

PSU

Seasonic M12-II 620W

Team Fortress 2. That game is like a million years old and some current machines still have problems with it on max settings.

Haters gonna hate, and bitches gonna bitch. Do your research next time.

Also, turn off ubersampling - who the hell needs it?

Try Witcher 2 without Ubersampling, like everyone has said Mobile graphics chips will never be at the level of desktop parts.