Playability/compatability of Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004) on laptops?

Usually the limitation is the graphics card, which few laptops have. I've found a few sites saying that these are the minimum requirements (double ram and video memory for recommended) for the game:



Specific supported video cards were named as:

Everywhere that condition is mentioned, its really vague on the why. Even at the Eidos Software site, there is a contemporary generic warning/disclaimer not just for the game of Thief: Deadly Shadows, but for all of its software games it produces and distributes, despite the advances in gaming designed specific laptops.

So if its a question of graphic card compatibility? With the game being so relatively old and my computer being such a moderately powerhouse gaming computer, then there most likely not an issue right now. I'm just worried that it actually maybe some kind of undisclosed DRM trick or another type of hardware issue.

Yeah, I realize if I bought the game and it didn't lose, I'd only be out a mere $20 + tax, I'd rather not waste the money on a game I can never use.

The advances of the graphics card can sometimes make the games unplayable if they don't provide backwards compatibility with older graphics engines. Basically, the software is programmed to use specific APIs such as Direct3D 9 and Pixel Shader.

Despite the advances in laptops, your graphics card might just not support the specific graphics APIs that they use. The only way I know around it (other than making sure to get a compatible graphics card) is to use software emulation to replicate the functionality. Here's an example from a tutorial on how to get another game that requires PixelShader working:

http://reabo.co.uk/_tutorials/legostarwarsproblem.aspx



In this case it doesn't seem like the overall resource requirements are the limitation, so that your gaming rig is powerful doesn't necessarily meet the requirements. It really does come down to whether you have a graphics card with at least 64mb of memory (and if you have one at all it will usually have one) and if said graphics card supports Direct3D 9.0,and Pixel Shader 1.1.

I think that those two items are the only graphics card concerns but I noticed you said you are running Vista, and I've seen several sites say that this game doesn't run on Vista (not sure if using an XP compatibility mode on Vista would fix that).



I don't think it's DRM myself, but that is always a potential headache with games so I'm not going to vouch for it. But it looks like it only supports XP for some reason.

I'll just skip the game and hope when Thief 4 comes out, I can play it without any issues of instability or confusion over any carried over story plots.

I also seen that this particular sequel isn't as cracked up (quality wise) as the first two games. Buggy and slow due to the porting of the game from the XBox (a first for the notable franchise).

What else can I say other then C'est le jeu! Thanks for the straight laced answers Mr. Gentel.