Sigh.....

[Morpheus]

Humble, I know exactly which mobo you've got. I've got an asus sk8n with my sound card from soundblaster. The mobo is ok at best. I am not pleased with it.

This weekend I've dont just about all there is to do with my drivers.

I even made a list of the ones out there I know work best for each peice of hardware and trieded every posible combination.

No luck.

[Naudet]

Using an old Athlon 2400XP with 512MB SD-RAM, onboards sound and ATI9500Pro, i am usually at 25-40 FPS.
Many GVs and Bandits will sometimes push me down to around 12-15.

I set ground distance to the absolute minimum, so i don't have much trees to care about, but i on the other hand i use force 4xAA for image quality.

I would expect systems like Morpheus' or humble's to run AH2 at full details without problems, wonder what goes wrong?

[Morpheus]

I EVEN pulled out one of my brand new sticks of memory thinking maybe one of them was bad/shorted out/who knows... to try and solve horrid frps.

One thing I do see is that I will have all this unused memory at the top of my screen and I'm still getting crapy rates.

Is my system too stupid to realize that it's got all that other memory to use? Or is the game too stupid? Everything is stupid right now. Im at wits end with this.

[Naudet]

Morpheus, do you have the "Preload Textures" box checked?
I have and it reduced inflight reloading alot. Also you will see that your video memory is much better used.

[Adjuster]

seems to be a theme going on here.

AMD64 3400+
2Gig PC3200
ATI X800Pro

Nothing Overclocked !

Tower 60s - 100s (cant get Vsync to work on any setting may be cos I use DVI connection ? dunno )

In Air no trees 80 - 200

On deck near trees 15-25  

GV Mode F4 single figures ie 3-7 fps.

Admittedly I use 1024 textures but cant move sliders all the way to the left they are about 75-80% as the fps are too low .

I preload into system  not Video as 1024 textures use all the 256mb video memory.

With this done I only use about 40mb of the Vid memory leaving 210mb unused. Got no problems with system memory bout 900mb left free so no pagefile usage.

Dont get me wrong I am certainly not complaining about my Frame Rates who would. What does trouble me is the huge drop in frames when encountering the new trees not such a problem for me but my old rig would have frozen up solid.


Adjuster

[humble]

Adjuster...

Sounds about the same as mine....my GV framerate is a bit higher (most times) but I'm running 512 vs 1024 with everything preloaded. It seems that the soundcard issue is a minor one given other system specs here.

I'm going to run aquamark and se2003 benchmarks again tonight and see if anything changed there. Then run some GV's again and see what FPS I get. Then I'll start tweaking drivers and rebenchmark....then OC system 5%/10%....then swap in a sound card. Curious what I can do to up framerate.....

Morph I have no clue....have you run an aquamark bench on that system?? It should just scream....

[Morpheus]

I do very well with futuremarks benchs'. I will have to check on my scores, I remember being impressed. BUT, I fire up aces high and its like someone taking a chainsaw and cutting my system in half. I dont get it.

I had an X800 prior to buying this 6800ultra which I gave to my father when his gpu got roasted. That card, in this game, dominated. I will say no more... that'll open up a can of worms with the ati vs's geforce guys.

[Captain Virgil Hilts]

Makes me kind of hesitant to upgrade my video card. I have my detail settings about 1/3 of the way from performance towards details, and my textures set to 256, with 1024X768 resolution. updating to the 67 series Omega drivers got me an improvement in framerates, although I can't seem to get VSync turned on. I noticed nothing dramatic with regards to framerates in the last patch. I did notice the trees no look even more like camo net.

I've been considering upgrading to a newer 6600 series 256MB video card this month, along with a 21" monitor. I'm serious when I say I'm now hesitant to upgrade. The card will be over $150 shipped, money I can spend on something else if it won't make AH II even better.

I don't seem to have any of the terrible framerates people are getting, but I don't have the details cranked up, the game seems really playable to me. Lowest I've seen my framerate drop to is around 25-30 with a LOT of planes around. I was flying BETWEEN the trees last night with 50 FPS or better. I don't fool with GV's much, but Saturday I took a base with an LVT with around 20 planes present, and a lot of smoke, still had a framerate of 50+.

AMD 2500+ Barton Mobile
Soltek SL-75FRN2-RL
OCZ PC4000 Dual Channel Platinum (512)
WD 37 Gig Raptor 10K RPM RAID drive
VisionTek GeForce 3 Ti 200 64MB 4X AGP
Creative Audigy Live!

I am running the thing turned up to 220MHz and 11X, my
Motherboard/CPU/RAM benchmarks on par with a P4 3.4
Intel.

The only thing I can think of that might make my rig run so much better is RAID and the speed of my RAM. It sure ain't the video card. Then again, it may not be all that good, I don't have all the pretty details some see.

[humble]

Virgil

My old card is a Ti-4200....a great great card. I wouldnt bother to update until you upgrade your CPU/MB. Historically I dont like to GV...but with the new tree's its actually a huge improvement. Use the F4 view (if you dont) and see what your frame rates are....

[humble]

Originally posted by Morpheus
I do very well with futuremarks benchs'. I will have to check on my scores, I remember being impressed. BUT, I fire up aces high and its like someone taking a chainsaw and cutting my system in half. I dont get it.

I had an X800 prior to buying this 6800ultra which I gave to my father when his gpu got roasted. That card, in this game, dominated. I will say no more... that'll open up a can of worms with the ati vs's geforce guys.

Morph....

I ran my mark3 2003 bench....was horrible....half of what it should be. Didnt have time to trouble shoot it but will tonight. Run your benchs again before you tinker...if you see the same scores then you have an AH issue...I'm guessing I have a more broad based problem (although everything else runs great)....

[StarOfAfrica2]

XP 2600+ O'cd to 2.3Ghz

1GB Corsair RAM

Geforce 5900XT O'cd to 5900U speeds

SoundBlaster sound card

Bioware M7NCD motherboard.

AA at 2x, AF off, Vsync ON, 512 max textures.

Ingame sliders at 80% to the left, bottom "range" slider at 50%.

-------------------------------------------------------

After the last patch, I'm getting 80+ fps in the tower.  Yes the trees do affect my fps, but not nearly as much as the animated water (this is a problem unique to the 5xxx series video cards).  I cant explain why a system that should be running rings around mine isnt.  Perhaps you should run your Direct X diagnostic and send it to Skuzzy for a look through.  Mabye he can point out some things to help you.

[68DevilM]

Originally posted by Tumor
Well?  What are you doing?  Whats your FPS?

i get 40-60 fps, but i also streamlined windows xp to make it faster by turning everything off that you dont need that takes up resouces

[Morpheus]

I've done some reading up on my mobo Humble...

heh. Its a peice of crap to say the least. No one likes it. I should have checked around more before I took the advise of one person I know. I figuredthat because he had a similar setup and it worked well for him I'd get it... Wrong.

Maybe he's got some sort of secret drivers I dont know about.

I think I shall rip it from my case and smash it into a thousand itzy bitzy peices when I get another one.

All I know is that soon, if I crank anymore power into this box to run AH to where I like it to run, Im going to have to invest in a deisel generator dedicated to running my power supply.

[Captain Virgil Hilts]

I'm wondering, why is it people are running PC3200 RAM with really fast systems?

I intentionally went with PC4000 RAM to be able to run my RAM and my CPU REAL hard and in synchronous mode. although I don't have a lot of RAM, my 512MB usually scores as high as a lot of other guys 1Gig or more, but few of them are running PC4000RAM in Dual Channel synchronous mode. It seems to make my CPU work a lot faster as well. Odd how my rig benchmarks up there with P4 3.4 rigs with 1Gig or more of RAM.

Humble, I won't swap out the CPU/MB in this rig, I'd only upgrade the RAM to 1Gig (same RAM just more of it) and the video card. otherwise I'll build a new rig.

[humble]

I dont think you have much top end with regard to a better GPU. I had a fan failure that fried my 2500+...went ahead and upgraded. Otherwise I'd of stayed with the Ti-4200. Dont think a card upgrade will gain much. the 2500+ and Ti-4200 match up pretty well.

I'm still using my old ram from previous system. Certainly will upgrade as needed. Up till this patch system has been flawless....I'll redo bench marks tonight. Unless I had AVG or something running my 6750 3DMark 2003 inicates a real problem somewhere totally seperate from AH...