Please Read this if Your Laptop Has an NVIDIA Card

[sven4669]

If your laptop has an NVIDIA graphics card, it should be capable of running Stars in Shadow very smoothly. However, many such laptops will default to using their in-built Intel graphics drivers when running sis64.exe; causing the game to be slow and bug-prone. bevo has supplied an excellent guide[stars-in-shadow.com] for dealing with this issue, but a brief description of one fix is included below.

First, to check to see if you're affected by this issue, start up Stars in Shadow, and look at the text displayed in the lower righthand side of the main menu screen. Under the white text that says "64-bit binary", you'll see the name of the currently active graphics device. If this device name is "Geforce <something>", everything is working properly. But if the device name is "Intel <something>", then you can likely greatly improve performance by configuring your system to run sis64.exe using the NVIDIA drivers.

If you go into your NVIDIA control panel, under 3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings -> Program Settings, you should be able to find an entry for sis64.exe. Under that entry, there should be an option titled "Select the preferred graphics processor for this program". Set that entry to your NVIDIA adapter.

You should then be able to restart the game, and see the NVIDIA device name in the lower-right corner of the start menu.

Your conquest of the galaxy will then be able to proceed with optimal hardware support!

[Cap'n Darwin]

Which API or library are you using to query the video card being used by the game? I would like to investigate doing a similar thing for our next game to help those with dual chipped GPU laptops. Thanks.

[Arioch]

Originally posted by Cap'n Darwin:

Which API or library are you using to query the video card being used by the game? I would like to investigate doing a similar thing for our next game to help those with dual chipped GPU laptops. Thanks.

It's OpenGL.

[Cap'n Darwin]

Thanks.

[Vang]

If you can't find an entry for it in the drop down, click on the Add button to the right of it. sis64.exe should be in the list of programs that comes up. If not, you'll have to track it down to wherever you keep your Steam games.