Can't play on laptop now???

[Ildarus]

<p>Two days ago I played for hours on my laptop, tonight, after 10 minutes of play the fan is going into over drive and the bottome of my laptop is super hot to the touch. I am guessing this has to do with the shader changes going over to the GPU, can this be disabled?? I could easily play on balanced prior to this update.</p>

[TSR-KenC]

<p>I can report this, certainly - I don't believe it's possible to switch the rendering back to the way it was for shadows. Can you try temporarily disabling shadows and see if your laptop keeps stable?</p>

[Ildarus]

<p>I let it cool down and when I logged in next I changed some settings. I lowered Performance Profile to Very High Performance. It is playable again, but does not look as well.</p>

[TSR-KenC]

<p>It shouldn't be necessary to change everything to low - Can you try setting it to balanced but just turn the shadows settings off and see if it continues to heat up badly?</p>

[Ildarus]

<p>That seemed to fix it. I have it back on balanced, but have shadows turned off.</p><p>Thanks,</p>

[M0rticia]

<p>If you're not using a decent laptop cooler, you might want to look into getting one. Using a laptop cooler makes a HUGE difference when playing any game. <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=zalman+laptop+cooler&x=0&y=0" target="_blank">Zalman</a> makes awesome ones and they aren't that expensive.</p>

[TSR-KenC]

<p>Glad to hear the game stabilized when shadows were removed - I wish that weren't the only alternative!</p><p>A laptop cooler is an excellent recommendation if you're looking to up the ante without your laptop burning with the power of a thousand suns. </p>

[TygerMeow]

<p>You might want to look into getting a software GPU control for your GPU. There's a third party one for ATI, although development has been discontinued some time ago. Several companies that make nVidia cards make them. However, your laptop is probably using an OEM integrated chipset directly from the manufacturer.</p><p>If it has a separate fan, manually bumping the fan up may allow you to turn on shadows and not melt your lap/desk/cat.</p><p>On my desktop (where this is a much easier problem to solve) I keep the fan on GPU manually turned up to 60% all the time. It's still quieter than the rest of the computers in my office, but keeps the GPU cool enough under the load that EQ2 throws at it.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p>Besides the other suggestions, I'd also like to mention the air flow for your laptop.  Most laptops pull air from the bottom of the computer and vent air out the back.  If you can give either of those sections more room to 'breathe' then that will help a lot with heat dissipation.  My sister killed a laptop once because she had it sitting on a blanket and it couldn't pull air in through the bottom.  Obviously that's an extreme case, but the more room you can give it the better.</p>

[Dethdlr]

<p>Did they change this from test?  On test there was an option for GPU Shadows or CPU Shadows.  CPU Shadows is how it used to work.  GPU Shadows is the new feature that came out.  Did they remove the option for CPU Shadows when it went live?  If not, you should be able to swap it back to CPU Shadows.  Maybe I'm just confused.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>Decimatr@Kithicor wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Did they change this from test?  On test there was an option for GPU Shadows or CPU Shadows.  CPU Shadows is how it used to work.  GPU Shadows is the new feature that came out.  Did they remove the option for CPU Shadows when it went live?  If not, you should be able to swap it back to CPU Shadows.  Maybe I'm just confused.</p></blockquote><p>Yes, that option is still in the game.  You can find it at the following location:</p><p>Options > Display > Shadows > Shadow Type</p>