Introversion

zanzer7 wrote:EVE Online has an option, Render station environment. Unticking this can really help, as that is a very heavy part of rendering (whatwith all the lights, I suppose)

EVE Online also has another option. It's called Use LOD.
This has absolutely no relevance to the current issue.

I am very bored.

>.>
<.<

Also, the menu lags for about five minutes on startup. Other than that it's fine.
It clears up after all the menu buttons are highlighted with the white bars.

-Tyr

I expect that's because during that five seconds it detects a low FPS and gets rid off the menu effects.

From postrodent http://pixels.furiousbees.com/debug-dxdiag.txt :



This is wrong, uninstall your driver completely, reboot, cancel all new hardware Winodws dialog, install latest ATI/AMD drivers.

Tell us if it fixed it?

jelco the galactaboy wrote:

bert_the_turtle wrote:The menu background rendering is unusually costy, it uses several alpha blended layers and uses more fillrate than the game graphics in normal situations. A "low detail menu" switch would definitely be of help here.

Like RabidZombie sort-of said, there should be an in-game detection of low framerates in the menu which will disable the fancy effects. I'm pretty sure we saw stuff like that in the beta, so I figure it's still in there.

Jelco

We did, but I no longer see it taking effect. I guess it got disabled in the release build, or maybe it just isn't working for some people.

Shwart!!

The menu effect turns itself off for me on my system, dunno about you.

That is really unusual.
Maybe the change needs to be manually set, as well as automatic.

Even a preferences.txt option would help tremendously.

Shwart!!

System spec:
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz CPU
1.5GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card
Win XP SP3

Just bought the retail game and am having the 'choppy framerate' problem discussed here and in other threads.

Any fix/suggestions or is it a lost cause because of my NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200?

I'm affected too with my Nvidia Geforce FX 5900XT

As you can see it's one more Geforce series 5 card affected so it seems like Introversion used something that isn't completely supported by those cards. I hope this is fixable tho... During gameplay there occurs no lag

postrodent wrote:I have a Radeon 9600 with the latest drivers, and 512mb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ cpu. Here's the debug and dxdiag files. Anyone from Introversion want to chime in here? I can't wait to actually play this.

512 meg of RAM can be a serious issue. WinXP should have at least 1 gig to run well. 512 is bare minimum for WinXP so don't expect any real performance with that bottleneck. Maybe upping your RAM will stop some HD swapping witch in turn will free up some bus bandwidth etc etc.....

TomCat39 wrote:

postrodent wrote:I have a Radeon 9600 with the latest drivers, and 512mb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ cpu. Here's the debug and dxdiag files. Anyone from Introversion want to chime in here? I can't wait to actually play this.

512 meg of RAM can be a serious issue. WinXP should have at least 1 gig to run well. 512 is bare minimum for WinXP so don't expect any real performance with that bottleneck. Maybe upping your RAM will stop some HD swapping witch in turn will free up some bus bandwidth etc etc.....

The problem is the graphics card, not the RAM. Hence why the common factor here has been the GeForce 5 series GPU, not the amount of RAM.

And you're very wrong. XP runs on 64MBs or RAM. I severely doubt RAM is the bottleneck here.

RabidZombie wrote:

TomCat39 wrote:

postrodent wrote:I have a Radeon 9600 with the latest drivers, and 512mb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ cpu. Here's the debug and dxdiag files. Anyone from Introversion want to chime in here? I can't wait to actually play this.

512 meg of RAM can be a serious issue. WinXP should have at least 1 gig to run well. 512 is bare minimum for WinXP so don't expect any real performance with that bottleneck. Maybe upping your RAM will stop some HD swapping witch in turn will free up some bus bandwidth etc etc.....

The problem is the graphics card, not the RAM. Hence why the common factor here has been the GeForce 5 series GPU, not the amount of RAM.

And you're very wrong. XP runs on 64MBs or RAM. I severely doubt RAM is the bottleneck here.

But another user has the same card and doesn't have the issue so it's more than just the video card.

Just because XP will run on 64 meg (slow as molasses) doesn't mean it's running at top performance.

The video card can't do it's job if the machine is constantly swapping to the hard drive. Take your XP machine down to 64 meg and try any 3d game and tell me how well it operates.

Yeah, not a factor at all, and not recommended to up your memory. Especially for games.

It may or may not be directly related to this issue but it is good advice to up the memory in ANY case.

And I wasn't wrong, you misread. I said 1 gig to run well. But you conveniently ignored that tid bit.

TomCat39 wrote:

RabidZombie wrote:

TomCat39 wrote:

postrodent wrote:I have a Radeon 9600 with the latest drivers, and 512mb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ cpu. Here's the debug and dxdiag files. Anyone from Introversion want to chime in here? I can't wait to actually play this.

512 meg of RAM can be a serious issue. WinXP should have at least 1 gig to run well. 512 is bare minimum for WinXP so don't expect any real performance with that bottleneck. Maybe upping your RAM will stop some HD swapping witch in turn will free up some bus bandwidth etc etc.....

The problem is the graphics card, not the RAM. Hence why the common factor here has been the GeForce 5 series GPU, not the amount of RAM.

And you're very wrong. XP runs on 64MBs or RAM. I severely doubt RAM is the bottleneck here.

But another user has the same card and doesn't have the issue so it's more than just the video card.

Just because XP will run on 64 meg (slow as molasses) doesn't mean it's running at top performance.

The video card can't do it's job if the machine is constantly swapping to the hard drive. Take your XP machine down to 64 meg and try any 3d game and tell me how well it operates.

Yeah, not a factor at all, and not recommended to up your memory. Especially for games.

It may or may not be directly related to this issue but it is good advice to up the memory in ANY case.

And I wasn't wrong, you misread. I said 1 gig to run well. But you conveniently ignored that tid bit.

XP runs very well at 512 MB with plenty of RAM to spare for Multiwinia. Trust me. I didn't ignore any of your post. You're just misinformed.

Also, I'd be very careful blindly advising RAM upgrades. It's a stupid thing to do, especially since available RAM isn't always problem, and if it is there are sometimes other options.

Also, who has a 5 series and doesn't have this problem? I don't see anyone. Would you also be interested in knowing that Shwart!!! swapped out his GeForce 5 series card for a different one and the symptoms disappeared?

RabidZombie wrote:

TomCat39 wrote:

RabidZombie wrote:

TomCat39 wrote:

postrodent wrote:I have a Radeon 9600 with the latest drivers, and 512mb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ cpu. Here's the debug and dxdiag files. Anyone from Introversion want to chime in here? I can't wait to actually play this.

512 meg of RAM can be a serious issue. WinXP should have at least 1 gig to run well. 512 is bare minimum for WinXP so don't expect any real performance with that bottleneck. Maybe upping your RAM will stop some HD swapping witch in turn will free up some bus bandwidth etc etc.....

The problem is the graphics card, not the RAM. Hence why the common factor here has been the GeForce 5 series GPU, not the amount of RAM.

And you're very wrong. XP runs on 64MBs or RAM. I severely doubt RAM is the bottleneck here.

But another user has the same card and doesn't have the issue so it's more than just the video card.

Just because XP will run on 64 meg (slow as molasses) doesn't mean it's running at top performance.

The video card can't do it's job if the machine is constantly swapping to the hard drive. Take your XP machine down to 64 meg and try any 3d game and tell me how well it operates.

Yeah, not a factor at all, and not recommended to up your memory. Especially for games.

It may or may not be directly related to this issue but it is good advice to up the memory in ANY case.

And I wasn't wrong, you misread. I said 1 gig to run well. But you conveniently ignored that tid bit.

XP runs very well at 512 MB with plenty of RAM to spare for Multiwinia. Trust me. I didn't ignore any of your post. You're just misinformed.

Also, I'd be very careful blindly advising RAM upgrades. It's a stupid thing to do, especially since available RAM isn't always problem, and if it is there are sometimes other options.

Also, who has a 5 series and doesn't have this problem? I don't see anyone. Would you also be interested in knowing that Shwart!!! swapped out his GeForce 5 series card for a different one and the symptoms disappeared?

The poster in question has a Radeon 9600 not a geforce card. I assume you know the difference between ATI and NVidia cards. I was talking about another poster in the thread said they have the same card (ATI 9600) and got it to work without choppiness.

And XP runs okay with 512, not very well. I'm not misinformed, I've experienced both. Once I upped my ram from 512 on XP to 1 gig, I noticed a major performance boost in everything I did. So I will always recommend upping RAM regardless of issue. There is nothing wrong with adding more ram to a low ram machine. There is however an upper limit and I won't say to go above 2 gig for an XP machine. Assuming a NON tweaked default install XP machine with resource wasting services running such as Indexing etc.

If you do an XP lite you can get XP running very well on 512 but that's not for the average user.

Just because you wish to discredit me, doesn't mean I gave bad advice as you'd have everyone believe. I'm not sure why you are trolling my posts. I wish you'd desist.

Wish all you want, fact is that lack of RAM is NOT the problem here. XP + Multiwina doesn't come close to filling 512M, and certainly not in the menu. It's not about making you look bad, it's just about finding and fixing the cause.

And claiming the ATI 9600 to be the cause as a geforce 5 series card isn't correct either, especially being that another user has an ATI 9200 running it without choppiness. That would indicate that it's not a card issue as was stated by Zombie in this particular case in which I was replying to. I'm not speaking about any of the known NVidia 5XXX series card issues.

And once again you assume that the user has a streamlined machine and doesn't run anything else at the same time as the game so 512 would be adequate.

I'm assuming the typical default install with all kinds of junk running at the same time as the game so maybe, just maybe, upping the memory may help. And if it doesn't it will help in other areas.

The person already said they don't want to buy another card. And being another user has a lower model card running it, I wonder what differences there are in the machines. It could be driver specific (quite possible with ATI) but also didn't think it would hurt the user to suggest upping memory a little. It's an inexpensive upgrade that can boost performance quite significantly.

Menu choppiness can be aquainted to low memory being that's when it's initially loading everything into memory and video memory etc. If a bunch of crap is running already that is sucking up memory prior to the game ever running (quite common on average users machines).... Then the memory isn't there for the game and upping the memory could possibly help. And since the user already has a good CPU (AMD 64 3500+), then a little more memory is always recommended.

One thing that hasn't been asked or stated is whether the menu ever settles out on the ATI 9600 machine. Or does it keep doing it even after a minute or two?

What Catalyst drivers are being used? What sorts of programs are running in the background? What services are enabled and running?

So much is left open in this particular incident.