Real Bad Frame Rates

[Torvald]

Looking for any help I can get here, within the last few weeks my frame rate has gone to toejam and I don't know how to fix it. If I am over a base that has smoke and more than 5 planes in the air my frame rate drops to the low teens to single digits!

My in-game video settings are 480x600, 16-bit color.

My pc stats are:
866 p3
584MB ram
video card is a geforce 4 with 64MB video ram.
Sound Card is a sound blaster live.

If you need additional info, I will periodically check the boards to see what info is requested. Hope someone can help, because if I can't inmprove my ingame performance, I am considering cancelling my account until I can buy a new system.

PS
Wife says buying a new PC is NOT an option. Not for a couple of years anyway

[gunahurl]

What operating system are you using?

Try turnning off some of the unnecessary processes that are running in the background on your computer.

For Windows 98 : With Windows running Hit Ctrl Alt Delete you should see a window that says "Close Program"

Select the process you want to close and use the "End Task" Button to end that process.  Do this for each process you want to stop. Make sure you  DO NOT END Exporer or Systray .

Windows XP is a little bit harder to do.
I would suggest you go to Black Viper's website.  http://www.blkviper.com/  And check out his Windows XP Services Profiles Guide, It Includes complete explanations of each service in XP, and advice on which services you can safely disable.


Gun  

[Torvald]

I am running windows 98. As far as I know, I am not running any other programs. I turn off all TSRs before starting the game. However, I am not sure, so when I get home tonight, I will try the Cntrl-Alt-delete and see what effect this has.

[qts]

Firstly, upgrade to XP. Seriously.

Secondly, disable your virus-checker.

Thirdly, for a cheap upgrade, upgrade to a P3-1000 if you can.

[snafu]

Hi Torvald,
Basically what gunahurl said about Win 98 apart from you can  kill "Systray" as well. (But don't kill Explorer)

TTFN
snafu

[SKurj]

try a higher resolution, run AH at least at the same resolution as your desktop, you might get a pleasant surprise


SKurj

[bloom25]

You mention this only started happening in the last few weeks?  Other than patch 4, have you made any changes to your PC or to AH during that time period?  (Is your video card a GeForce 4 Titanium or MX?)

I do not recommend moving to Windows XP solely to gain performance, its advantage over 98 (or ME) is stability.  On "older" systems you will lose gaming performance, not gain.  (Though it is fair to say that drivers for new hardware are certainly better optimized for Win2k/XP.)

As far as hardware upgrading goes, you are unfortunately quite limited.  If your card is a GeForce 4 MX you could improve performance by upgrading your video card to a GeForce 4 Titanium or Radeon 9500 class card.  Your CPU does not have the power to max out either of these 2 cards and is ultimately your biggest bottleneck.  It's likely the fastest CPU your board would accept is a 1 GHz P3 (though there is a chance you could use the very rare and expensive 1.26 GHz P3 or up to a 1.4 GHz Celeron).  The problem is that I do not believe changing to a 1 GHz P3 would make a significant difference and the money would be better spent on parts for a new system.

[bloom25]

It's also worth mentioning that you should be sure that antiailiasing and anistropic filtering are turned off.  Turning these on will destroy performance on that system.

Where these options are at depend on what driver version you are running, but in general they can be found by:

Right clicking the desktop -> properties -> settings -> advanced -> (tab for your video card) and find your way to Direct3d settings.

You might also changing your mip map detail setting to best performance versus best image quality.

You can also possibly gain a few FPS by pressing Shift F2 in the game to reduce the distance the terrain is drawn.  (There are Shift F1 - F3 levels.)

I would also recommend running AH at the same resolution as your desktop.

[lord dolf vader]

ya know adaware couldent hurt . ya get some of thos gator comet cursor thingys and wham no proformance at all on older stuff.

[qts]

I do not recommend moving to Windows XP solely to gain performance,

Given the large amount of memory he has, he should actually see a slight increase due to better system management. XP won't be swapping at all.

[blackfalcon4]

Hello,

You say pc has 585mb of ram?
Win98 only can see and use 512mb,try taking out a stick and see what you get. I've seen performance hits using more than 512.

GF4, is this an mx card, or a TI card?


Just put together a system from spare parts that I'm gonna sell on the cheap; asus k7t, athlon slot 850, 256mb pc133, 30gb hd, GF2 pro 32mb, SB live, win98, run AH @ 1024x768 32bit on 17" samsung at my shop

I get 85fps down to 55fps in heavy smoke w/this pc

[bloom25]

Windows 98 can support up to 768 MB of memory (without hacking the registry to support more).  It's a common misconception that it is limited to 512 MB.  (I think this myth got started because the very popular i815 Intel chipset was limited to 512MB of addressable sdram.)  

It is fair to say the NT based Windows OSes have superior memory management than the old Dos based Win9x OSes.  I still think $199 is much better spent toward hardware than software though.  For $199 dollars you could get a GeForce 4 Titanium or Radeon 9500 card which would improve gaming performance far more than Windows XP would.

[Siaf__csf]

Not to mention that AH runs with about 70Mb of memory. It won't swap even with a 256Mb system, ever.

[Ragnar]

Hey first of all. To prevent you from having to Alt+Cntrl+Delete every time you boot. There is a better way. If your using Win2k or XP I can send my MSCONFIG and you can disable anything you dont want to boot and windows will not start it up.

I have 3 processes running on startup. Sound control, Explorer and TEMP ALERT.

[Ragnar]

Also if you are using XP or 2000. Dont worry about it. MSCONFIG 98 works with all MS os'es ever made. Microsoft just decided to leave it out of later Operating Systems.