Hello all, I recently got Book 1 from Stardock/Impulse. Installed the game on my laptop and the game is running very slowly. My laptop specs are:
Intel Core2Duo T5550 @ 1.83Ghz
4 GB RAM
Mobile Intel 965 (384 MB video memory)
Windows 7 64bit.

My performance rating comes to around 29 - 35 on high graphics setting and to about 20 on low graphics settings. Any help/suggestions? or is the 965 chipset incapable of playing this game?

I'm pretty sure Bernie can come along and give you a (diatribe) informational explanation about why the Intel graphics chipset sucks for drawing sprites. The fact is, you're unlikely to get good performance, particularly in the wooded areas of the game, from that machine. A proper Windows aficionado can probably give you some advice on improving it somewhat (trying different video modes), but your best experience will be on a machine with a more capable video engine.

It is not just the wooded areas. I am just beginning the game and am in the destroyed town (Elderhollow?)...
oh well...

I've played Civ 4, TES III: Morrowind and King's Bounty on the same machine with no issues at all... Kinda surprised that this game is running so slow... that's all

Yeah, the Intel GMA does well in some aspects of the DirectX/OpenGL acceleration, and falls flat on its face in others. I have a 12 year old laptop that has a 32MB Radeon 7500 chip which runs circles around the GMA965 in most games, including Eschalon and some Quake/Quake 2 ports with fancy shader functions.

It's like taking a V8 powered car and giving it a straw for an exhaust pipe.

I do feel that Eschalon *could* be faster, but it's also being held back by the programming language. Sometimes the shorter learning curve comes at a cost, and obviously it's not going to be worth it for BW to learn a completely new programming language at this point just to save a few FPS. Perhaps for the next series, the new style combined with lessons from Eschalon will allow him to craft a game engine that will run like butter on everyone's computer!