Aces High Bulletin Board
Help and Support Forums => Help and Training => Topic started by: nrshida on August 12, 2014, 05:00:28 AM
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 :lol
Thanks for all the help (so far!)
:salute
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you should really do a defrag--and a old file dump.
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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).
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Thank you Skuzzy. I shall do that.
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Think I might have found the culprit:
(http://i1114.photobucket.com/albums/k526/rwrk2/996156_10203570125866559_5063439016246231032_n_zpsad39a24c.jpg) (http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/rwrk2/media/996156_10203570125866559_5063439016246231032_n_zpsad39a24c.jpg.html)
(http://i1114.photobucket.com/albums/k526/rwrk2/10547634_10203570125346546_6363985799703260641_n_zps4ceadc78.jpg) (http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/rwrk2/media/10547634_10203570125346546_6363985799703260641_n_zps4ceadc78.jpg.html)
(http://i1114.photobucket.com/albums/k526/rwrk2/1521211_10203570124586527_336753090365941414_n_zpse8d68353.jpg) (http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/rwrk2/media/1521211_10203570124586527_336753090365941414_n_zpse8d68353.jpg.html)
It's the dishwasher for you me old China!
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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.
:salute
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My guess would be cooling or low available memory.
:aok :P
Glad you found the issue!
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Wow I guess you never cleaned that thing off.... ever :bolt:
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Glad you found the issue!
:banana: :aok
Wow I guess you never cleaned that thing off.... ever :bolt:
:lol No I never even removed the cover before. :old:
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That sure looked gross! As a side note, hadn't you mentioned it's a macbook, I would have guessed it's a HP Envy! Just opened one the other day and the inside layout is surprisingly similar. Had to google for it (http://www.laptopreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_2332.jpg)to be sure...
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Try disabling non-essential backgroung processes before running the game. I always disable my antivirus and firewall also. Makes a big difference for me.
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My graphics had similar weirdness right before my video card failed.
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My video card did fail on me. I had to go back to the onboard video card for now. It holds frame rates surprisingly well avg. of about 50-59 however when I fly around smoke and fire it just dumps into the teens. Does anyone have any tips on video settings to help until I decide to replace the card or computer. I noticed that the video resolution is still 1920x1200 I believe that's what it was prior to the video card going out. It does show that its using the onboard chipset, and the video card has been removed from computer. Thanks for any help, I've never had to mess with any video settings at all so I'm very unsure of changing anything.
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Dealer, try Waffle's tips: http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,231506.0.html (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,231506.0.html). You might want to decrease some values even lower than the defaults to start with. If you're running an Intel onboard chip, be prepared for strange behaviour. Anyway, crank everything down and work your way up to the level you feel comfortable with. One hint: Leave the Environment mapping to "none".
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When you start the game and the clipboard first comes up, instead of clicking on "on line arenas" click on "video settings". On the anti-alison be sure it is set to "none" and the texture size drop one setting lower. If its 512 go to 256. Try the game again and see how your FR are. if better and you can live with it your all set.
Other things you can do is IN the game check the graphics setting. Start turning stuff off or slide sliders to "faster" to help cut back on graphic so your computer has an easier time keeping up.
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Its set to 1024 in default mode will reducing this help? and if so will it be a noticeable change?...I have moved the slider to fastest setting and gotten rid of plane skins etc....any other tips would help....Someone is supposed to be sending me a video card, I understand that almost any video card is better then onboard. From what Ive heard in the game I have higher framerates then some players with vid cards, so I guess im lucky to have it this good for now. It holds up very well untuil Im around smoke and fire. Crashes a perk plane trying to land on a carrier that was burning yesterday with 3 kills (very unusual for me) the 3 kills that is.
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I tried reducing whats running in the background of my PC also...its extremely hard to find out what you really need to be running since every PC setup is different. It seems I have a lot running in the background. It takes a lot of time researching what you need and disabling things one at a time...when im on I wanna play dammit!
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Go to blackviper.com He has a got list of what you can and what you shouldn't turn off.
Drop the texture to 512 and then try the game. You may not see much of a difference, but if it gives you better frame rates, all to the good.