Frame Rates

[101ABN]

Ok, what is the deal with the crappy frame rates.. the planes are break dancing (warping) all over the place. what can we do to tackle this problem.. i have never seen it this bad in AH1.. shed some light on this please.


PS. my puter is one of the best on the market today... actually bought it and built on to it for AH2... dont tell the wife. ha ha

[bustr]

What is the refresh rate of your monitor when you are at the desktop not in the game? That will be close to your maximum refresh rate in the game when you check CTRL-I. But as you get closer to the ground, near fires, smoke, or in a furball your FPS will go down.

I just purcahsed a new monitor so I could set the refresh to 120Hz at 1024x768. Now my maximum FPS in the game is max 119 and min 45.  I'm assuming your video card is AGP 2 or 4. Increasing my RAM to 1Gig helped my video. AGP offloads to RAM certain video processes.  When I increased the RAM to 1gig the game started using just over 600Mbyte.  That means when I was at 512Mbyte RAM my game play was slowed by pagefile access.

My previous monitor could only be set to 100Hz at 1024x768. In AH1 I had 100 FPS max and 60 min. In AH2 I got 99max to 25min. The minimum affected my game play near the ground or in furballs. Upgrading to 1 gig of RAM helped the minimum. I started getting 34 FPS where I was getting only 25. With that in mind I infered if I could increase my refresh rate, then I would increase my minimum FPS. Turns out I was correct. Now my minimum is 45 FPS and I'm having more fun.

Almost makes you wish there was a setting to make the game 2D 256 colors for the environment with the planes being HI-Res. Lotta folks would get better FPS and stop complaining. Never bothered me to fly AW in 2D res. Shooting down planes was more important.

Oh, and yeah I bought this box last year specifically to play AH2. Figured it would be a resource HOG.

DELL 8250
INTEL 850E chipset
P4 3.06 cpu
1-gig RAMBUS PC1066
ATI 9700 Pro 128
XP Home
VeiwSonic 220G running @1024x768 120hz
SBCGlobal DSL

[ChasR]

Originally posted by bustr
With that in mind I infered if I could increase my refresh rate, then I would increase my minimum FPS. Turns out I was correct. Now my minimum is 45 FPS and I'm having more fun.

[

Sorry but there's no way that a higher maximum refresh rate on a monitor can affect the minimum frame rate in the game.  Something else caused the increase in the min. FPS, a changed setting on your video card, or in game video settings.  It absolutely wasn't the monitor.

[bustr]

ChasR,

No the only change was the Monitor which supports 1024x768@120Hz. The previous monitor is about 10 years old and pushing it to 100Hz was asking alot of it. It would be interesting to understand why this change improving my FPS minimum is an impossibility?

By the way, I'm a server engineer for Bank of America. I've been supporting Microsoft on servers and PC's for about 12 years. For a few years I was a MS Exchange engineer for QRS Corp., Richmond CA. I know my memory is getting feeble, but,  I think I had to setup, interconnect and maintain sites in NY, MA, GA, VA, and Hong Kong.

At one time early on I was a hardware technician for Media Vision in Fremont California supporting sound cards and video cards for 2 years. I know I still have alot to learn, please be patient with me.

[MOSQ]

I have never heard of the monitor refresh rate having any effect on minimum FPS, only the maximum.

Two quick test would be very interesting:

1) Without doing anything else, plug your old monitor back in and check the exact same map/airfield that gives you the 45 minimum.

2) Run your new monitor at 85 refresh and see what happens to your minimum, again same map and airfield.

The map you are on has a lot to do with it. Fester's Ozkansas map is "guaranteed" to have lower frame rates than all the other maps because it has more objects. That's why the map and airfield has to be the exact same or the tests are meaningless.