Weird Graphics Setting Issue

[nrshida]

Haven't changed anything with my computer but suddenly detailed water and detailed terrain won't stay on. My framerate drops to below 6 and then I get an orange text message saying these have been disabled. Then the game runs fine again. I play on a MacBook Pro which I sometimes take to the University's workshop. I was wondering if dust could be causing poorer cooling. Does AH monitor the temp of your graphics chip / CPU perhaps?

[Bizman]

AH doesn't monitor temperatures but the CPU does and will slow down if it gets too hot. Another thing is, that your computer might have dual video processors and for some reason it has dropped to the weaker one which usually is an Intel.

[The Fugitive]

Another thing could be a poor connection.  If your computer takes to long to load the data the game will turn down the graphics automatically.

[Skyyr]

Haven't changed anything with my computer but suddenly detailed water and detailed terrain won't stay on. My framerate drops to below 6 and then I get an orange text message saying these have been disabled. Then the game runs fine again. I play on a MacBook Pro which I sometimes take to the University's workshop. I was wondering if dust could be causing poorer cooling. Does AH monitor the temp of your graphics chip / CPU perhaps?

The game reverts graphics settings whenever it has difficulty rendering them. When I'm rendering video or running another game on my second monitor (i.e. taxing my system resources), my graphics will many times revert. My guess would be cooling or low available memory.

Another thing could be a poor connection.  If your computer takes to long to load the data the game will turn down the graphics automatically.

Connection has absolutely nothing to do with loading local resources.

[Wiley]

The disabling detailed stuff happens if your framerate drops below a certain threshold for too long.

When does the framerate drop and it loses the detailed settings?  Is it when the game first loads, within say, 15-30 seconds of starting?  If so, after you get the message and it disables them, can you reenable them and have it run fine?

If so, I had a similar symptom where as the game loaded my framerate would drop, disabling detailed water and terrain.  Once the textures had fully loaded and the map had been updated, I could re-enable detailed water and terrain and run at 60fps.  From what I could see it appeared to be an issue with loading everything on startup.  Once stuff was loaded, it ran fine.

I believe it boiled down to my settings basically being right at the edge of what my system could handle.  It was a couple years ago, but if I remember right, knocking shadow texture size down a notch or disabling the shadow smoothing checkbox made the problem go away.

One quick and easy thing- When's the last time you defragged the hard drive?  That might help if it's as I described it above.

YMMV, good luck.

Wiley.

[Skuzzy]

Connection has absolutely nothing to do with loading local resources.

Not quite true.  If the connection is being hammered (inbound or outbound) and taking the CPU away from running the game, it can cause a time out to occur.

Wiley is on track, except it probably is not related to the hard drive.  I would suspect resource issues from possible suspect programs running in the background first.

To reduce the speculation, it would be helpful to have DXDIAG output and exactly what game settings are being used.  Spend some time in the Windows Task manager or resource monitor to see what is happening with your computer when it is idle.

[Skyyr]

Not quite true.  If the connection is being hammered (inbound or outbound) and taking the CPU away from running the game, it can cause a time out to occur.

True, but that's directly due to the CPU (as you pointed out), not the connection. Any resource that taxes the CPU (or GPU) could cause such an occurrence, so it's not something unique to connection.

[Skuzzy]

True, but that's directly due to the CPU (as you pointed out), not the connection. Any resource that taxes the CPU (or GPU) could cause such an occurrence, so it's not something unique to connection.

I am aware of that.  My response to your post was just to clarify the statement you made.  Typical users use "connection" as a global reference to encompass everything in the software and hardware.  Stating the "connection" is not the cause, can be misleading.

Part of the "connection" involves the physical medium used to establish the network communications.  Thus, stating the "connection" can be the problem is quite correct.  It is not uncommon for people running torrent software to encounter timeouts in the game and lost packets all because of a background torrent running over the "connection".

Yes, any type of resource issue can manifest the same problem described in the original post.

[nrshida]

The disabling detailed stuff happens if your framerate drops below a certain threshold for too long.

When does the framerate drop and it loses the detailed settings?  Is it when the game first loads, within say, 15-30 seconds of starting?  If so, after you get the message and it disables them, can you reenable them and have it run fine?

If so, I had a similar symptom where as the game loaded my framerate would drop, disabling detailed water and terrain.  Once the textures had fully loaded and the map had been updated, I could re-enable detailed water and terrain and run at 60fps.  From what I could see it appeared to be an issue with loading everything on startup.  Once stuff was loaded, it ran fine.

I believe it boiled down to my settings basically being right at the edge of what my system could handle.  It was a couple years ago, but if I remember right, knocking shadow texture size down a notch or disabling the shadow smoothing checkbox made the problem go away.

One quick and easy thing- When's the last time you defragged the hard drive?  That might help if it's as I described it above.

YMMV, good luck.

Wiley.

It's happening exactly the same offline if that's helpful diagnostically. This never used to happen at all a year ago that's why I'm suspicious of dust. It's started happening sooner. Maybe 30 seconds after I turn them back on now.

Hard drive I never defrag. I run AH on Windows XP through Bootcamp. I only ever play Aces High, look on the forum or play the BBC radio when booted into Windows. I never surf or download anything.

To reduce the speculation, it would be helpful to have DXDIAG output and exactly what game settings are being used.  Spend some time in the Windows Task manager or resource monitor to see what is happening with your computer when it is idle.

Hmmm, righto I'll have a look on YouTube for some 7 year old's tutorial on how to do that 

Thanks for all the help (so far!)

 

[lunatic1]

you should really do a defrag--and a old file dump.

[Skuzzy]

The "resource Monitor" is located in the Windows Control Panel, in the "Performance and Information Tools" panel.

DXDIAG is run from the "cmd" box (Start->Run).  Simply type in DXDIAG and let it run.  A button allows you to save all the information as a text file, which you can then email or post here (in pieces as it is too large for one post).

[nrshida]

Thank you Skuzzy. I shall do that.

[nrshida]

Think I might have found the culprit:








It's the dishwasher for you me old China!

[nrshida]

So after the pots and pans cycled had finished, I dried it off with a Bosch hot air gun and gave the circuit board a good rub with a wire brush and Detol disinfectant.

Problem resolved, ran with detailed terrain and water on again for an hour. Managed to improve my performance for the Beta test. I'll post the new set of framerates.

Many thanks for all the help.

 

[Skyyr]

My guess would be cooling or low available memory.

 

Glad you found the issue!