How good is my Laptop for Gaming? *Advice needed*

[JohnAvery]

Hello everyone I'm new here. I do have a lot of questions to ask because I'm not that well-informed about computers.

So basically I bought a new laptop from BestBuy, and its a Windows 7 64 bit.
It came with Directx 11 on it which is nice, however I'm just curious about my graphic card's goodness.

It runs games, but whenever I try to get a high quality out of newer games like Dragon Age Origins, it really slows down (usually when fog or explosions occur). I run other games like Age of Empires 3 just fine, (except I do turn down the water effects)

Its an AMD M880g with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200. It has 384 dedicated memory, as well as 1986 total memory. I have 4096 RAM on my computer and I usually have between 2-3.5 of that available.

My CPU is also another thing I'm curious to know about.
Its an AMD athlon II Dual-Core M300 (2 CPUs), ~2.0 ghz
Now does that mean that each core is 2.0 ghz or is it a total of 2.0ghz... also is that even a good speed? Most games demand over 2.0ghz, but my laptop seems to run them just fine.

Finally, if I have Directx 11 shouldn't that mean that my graphic card utilizes all of the memory available to its maximum potential? Is my graphic card even compatible with Dx11 or did I get ripped off (I still have my receipt)?

I would assume that the reason my graphic card doesn't perform so well with these games is because they are not directx 11 compatible? Or am I mistaken, will my computer do well with the dx11 games in the future?

The overall performance of my pc is great, but when it comes to gaming, which I do like to do, it doesn't seem to get that very high graphic detail that I want. It goes to high, but not very high.

Anyways, I hope somebody can help me out here because I'm clueless about my graphic card, should I buy a new one? Any suggestions?

If you would like to know, the games I would like to be playing on high graphics are games like Diablo 3, Dragon Age Origins, etc. Things on that level... (nothing like Crysis)

So thank you, whoever you are for reading this far, I hope you can help me out.

 

[TriplexDread]

Unless you spend a a couple of grand on a laptop its gonna be no good for gaming.

Laptops are easily portable however, Gaming and upgrading past a certain point - Forget it!

You should have spent ya money on a desktop/tower PC and bought a lower end laptop

Simplllllzzz

IMO

 

[muckshifter]

welcome to PCR

Hello


IMHO

Laptops don't make good gaming machines

ATI don't make video cards, they just think they do

DX11 is the latest buzz word, most games are still using DX9

It is unusual for laptops to be "upgradeable" other than adding the ram that was missing in the first place

 

[floppybootstomp]

Laptops were not designed for gaming, their prime purpose is mostly as mobile machines for the likes of students and business people.

If you want to play Dragon Age Origins you'll just have to set the resolution lower.

Your CPU is running two cores at a common speed of 2Ghz so you have a 2Ghz machine, think of the 2 cores as one with twice as much processing power as a single core.

There are very few games, probably about 20, that take advantage of DX10 and as Mucks pointed out most games use DX9, even most of the latest games.

If you really want to play games on your laptop, select those that are not graphics-intensive.

 

[JohnAvery]

Thank you all for your input, I think I that gave me some perspective on what to do with my laptop. It is a decent laptop if that is the case, it runs my favorite RTS and I will be using it primarily for university so I guess I'll keep it.

I bought it for a fairly cheap price of 650 dollars and I guess I will be upgrading my PC then for gaming. Thanks again!