the game was practically unplayable until i changed the level of graphic detail to very low. its not as if my pc is rediculously shitty or anything, im running it on a year old laptop, and have a GeForce 8600 series nvidia card with physX intalled.

Well it may not support the M series properly, even though it can run. Manuals always state as much. 

Your first issue is you're trying to game new games on a laptop.  The 8600 was never a really good card to begin with for modern games.  The fact that it's the M series card doesn't do you any favors either.  It's more useful for multimedia such as HD video.  Trine is a very Physics heavy game that challenges even the more advanced desktop cards on the market.

btw, physX is in these older cards is a software implementation and not hardware based.

i was but i also had to install a new driver pack for my card. A quick reboot sorted that out. 

Try updating your driver, nVidia recently started releasing reference drivers for laptop GPUs 7-series and newer.

oh well. i updated my drivers already and it still runs like shit. anyways the gameplay more than makes up for this imo so im happy i could get it to run at a steady framerate at all.

Remember, nVidia severley fucked up with the 8600m so it might be that you just have a really crappy chip.  Go read about it, that laptop may not be meant for games anymore, go shoot it out back.

ah really i do next to no pc gaming so didnt know. the last pc game i played was zeno clash, and before that KOTOR.

While I know about the 8600M fuckups, my Vostro 1500 I got before the news broke does decently and it's running the 8600M.