Aces High Bulletin Board
Help and Support Forums => Technical Support => Topic started by: Baine on February 20, 2003, 01:32:36 PM
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My frames are in the high 30s when I’m taking off, (higher if nothing’s smoking or I’m alone.) Usually in the high 50s-60s when I’m flying around and then dropping back to the 30s when dogfighting in open country. (Offline I can cruise around in the 80s.)
But get me into a furball over a trashed, smoking base and I’m in a low teens slide show. The furball problem is fairly recent. I’ve also noticed increasing problems with “stutter.”
Any suggestions before I open my wallet and my machine and start upgrading? I’ve been toying with the idea of improving the CPU, but I want to wait until AH:TOD is released (and my wife and kids are out of town for a few days) before I perform brain surgery.
‘Til then: I’ve cleaned a lot of junk off the hard drive (15mb with 5 free) defragged, which helped the stutter a bit, updated drivers for sound, video and my MB’s Via chips. I also ran a virus check and scanned the system with Ad Aware. And, finally, I make sure nothing but essential programs are running when I fire up AH and I generally play the game with clutter off and graphics settings at f2.
My system:
Win 98
DirectX 8.1
AMD Duron 800mhz
512mb ram (I’ve got another 128mb sitting in the machine, but Win98 won’t let me use it)
GEForce4 440SE 64mb
Sigmatel onboard soundchip (eek! But how important is a soundcard to performance?)
Soyo k7vta-pro motherboard with a Via 8363 and 82c686b chipsets)
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The Trinity terrain was quite hard on textures so I noticed the old jerkarama in furballs over bases where the surrounding terrain had a lot of detail and my CPU is/was slightly faster than yours, your quoted fps figures are quite reasonable for your setup, I wasn't getting much faster than those. Trinity seemed to exagerate any limitations.
Your video card won't be the problem, but upgrading the CPU is the right way to go if your board accepts faster ones.
From your quoted fps I don't think you will get any better without upgrading the CPU. Your fps figures seem nearly as good as mine were. I bit the bullet and upgraded my CPU first a couple of days ago which gave me an immediate benefit of 25- 30% increase on fps from what I had before. :)
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your vid card is fine, i use an mx 440, and with an XP1800 my fps peaks at 125+, but it does get abit slow when in the biggest furballs.
What res are you playing at whats your desktop set to?
I recommend playing at your desktop res or higher.
In the past many players myself included found the game ran better at 1024x768 than at 800x600, and I really can't decide the reason...
Also run in 16bit colour if you don't already
SKurj
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Thanks for the help.My dt res is 640x480. My AH res is 1024x768. I just switched to 16 bit color, tried limiting my fr to 45 and tweaked my vcache so I can now run 640mbs ram under Win98.
Skurj, what drivers are you using for your card. I understand that can make a big difference.
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Originally posted by SKurj
In the past many players myself included found the game ran better at 1024x768 than at 800x600, and I really can't decide the reason...
SKurj
That's because Geforce cards are optimized to run at resolutions of 1024x768 and above as well as at 32-bit resolution.
Ack-Ack
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I always getter better fps with 32 bit at 1027x768 (or higher) than I do with 16bit at the same resolutions (GeForce3)
I agree with Ack Ack
However there is no signifant difference running 32 bit or 16 bit on a new Raedon 9700 card I have in another PC in AH. :)