F.P.S. oddity

[Ohio330]

I have been struggling at the low end of F.P.S. running this game.  I have set all the plane-sets thru the spectrum of 1024 to 256 in the game set up, as well as monitor size, and doing this
has neither helped or worsened my frame rates.  I hear ppl
having success with lowering plane-sets to 256 etc. but this doesn't effect my F.P.S. at all.  Any ideas?

  I'm running a mutt computer i built with AMD-1800xp,
monitor set at 70hz.  ATI 9600SE, 1.5 gig pc 133 memory,
texures set to load at start up,  DX 9.0b, 60 Gig hard drive
that has plenty of space left on it.  Latest video cat 4.7 (well,
now that 4.8 is out, its not the newest)
   The latest patch seemed to lower my average frame rate on max vis (F1) to high teens, and min. vis may hit 50 if there is no
other planes in my view.  Furballs are a nightmare for f.p.s.
  I have the program that shuts down background running applications prior to game start up.  I have removed spyware.
I run on Cable modem.  Zonealarm is shut down, as well as
virus protectors.  Just can't seem to squeeze anything more out of my system unless someone has any other ideas.
   I have also set all the texure distances to minimum, as well
as uncheck the three boxes that ask for plane skins etc.
   I had defragged my hard drive prior to installing this game.

[FOGOLD]

This is tricky. Your RAM will be slowing you down as it's not DDR. Also the graphics card is not the fastest.  Your CPU is strong enough yet for AHII.

That CPU normally would run with 2100 DDR Ram at 266 Mhz? Find out if your mobo will accept DDR RAM. If it is running a  Athlon XP 1800+ like you say, it should.

If you can get even 512mb DDR 2100 RAM and a 9600 XT instead of a 9600 SE, which is a cut down card, you will get FPS up in the 30's most of the time.

The key is what Motherboard you have.

[Ohio330]

Ya my Mobo is older..it only uses pc100/133 memory chips.
4X AGP max for the graphics port as well.

[Aqualung]

I am seeing the same thing and I too have an older mobo with an Athlon 2000XP, 1 Gig PC133 DDR ram, and a GeForce 6800 GT 256 mb video card running AH2 at 1024x768 and 256mb textures.  You would think I would have a blazing framerate but my fps drops to the 20's when I get near the ground (the trees pop into my fov) or there are a few other planes around.  I'm thinking that its something with either the cpu or memory bus.   I'm pretty sure its not my video card nor my agp bus as I preload stuff into vram.  

AMD has a performance analyser called CodeAnalyst which I might try to use to see if the cpu is taxed, but I'm unsure as to how well analyser programs work on blackbox (aka I don't have the source) executables.  I also don't know if there is a way to tell if the system is cpu bound or mem bus bound.  

Or maybe we could bribe hitech or pyro to profile ah2 and let us know what is happening when the game is processing more objects.  
 


-aqua