Driver for GF 3 vid card

[Avenger]

Hello everyone,
I´ve had some touble with MTW since I bought it. The strategic map works fine but in the battlescenes, there is tremendous lagging espescially when there are a lot of troops (almost unplayable). I´ve read a lot of threads in the Apothecary forum, and tried to implement most of them.

My Specs are:

AMD Athlon 1,2 GHz
Kinetiz VIA motherboard
256 MB Ram
Creative GF 3 Ti 200 graphics
Sound Blaster Live
Win 98 SE O/S
Directx 8.1b

I´ve read that VIA mobo and SB cards dont work well together. I´ve uninstalled everything but latest driver for the SB (incl. the EAX and SB16 emulation), I´ve turned down hardware acceleration in directx to none. Also I´ve installed the latest 4 in 1 drivers for the mobo. For the graphic card I've installed the latest driver from creatives site. Still there is lag in battles.
When I had the old vid drivers, the battles were a lot smoother, but I had occational lock ups. With the old drivers I had probs playing another game (NHL 2003), so thats why I upgraded these.
Now to my questions: Does anyone know a GOOD driver for Geforce 3 Ti 200, (running smooth with MTW) and where do I find it (at creative, only the latest is available?&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
I´ve read recomendations of getting Nvidia detonator drivers, are these drivers to replace the creative drivers or do they work as a complement.
Thankful for fast answers...
Really want to play this great game without this lagging in the battles.

[Gregoshi]

Welcome Avenger and thanks for joining us here at the Org.

Your system should be running the game fine. Try the suggestions mentioned here (there are a lot of them): Battle slowdown with GeForce (http://www.totalwar.org/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=2;t=3469;hl=geforce)

Good luck with the slowdowns.

[SmokWawelski]

Just from my experience: I had GF2 GTS 32RAM from 3DLabs and the card was sloooow with detonator Drivers, yet fast with 3DLabs drivers. I never used Detonator again, only drivers from the people that made the card (unless they say: get the NVidia... This is why my Radeon is in the mail)

My brother has GF3 and plays MTW 1600x1200 flawlesly on P4 2GHz, 256DDR. I will check what drivers did I put on his box. I think detonator, but not sure... Also, I had temporarly my old VooDoo 3 3000 installed, and the game runs fine as far as speed (1024x768 on P3 933MHz with 512RAM), only all units/trees/buildings are surrounded by black boxes...

Therefore I speculate that it is not that your box cannot handle the game, but the setup has some problems...

As far as VIA - Creative, you are right, there are problems. I use this combo with the nevest 4in1 drivers and flashed BIOS, only lose sound in MTW ocasionaly (need to reboot), so I can live with that.

Your momo sounds unfamiliar, and the Win98 is not the best one around... Good luck http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[Avenger]

Now I actually got it to work properly in the battlescenes. I changed my setting in the virtual memory as was mentioned in the thread above. I now have 1024 MB at both max and min, and this seems to have speeded up the program. I also changed the AGP aperture setting to 128 MB (half of the RAM). But what I really think did the thing for me was when I set the Sound Quality to a minimum inside the game...

I haven´t had any probs since these changes (and I´ve played a couple of hours with some battles 1000+ soldiers).
The only thing is that my starting process in windows seems to be very SLOW and LAGGING (but I can live with this...)

Thx to you all

[Gregoshi]

...and there was much rejoicing http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/pat.gif

[Lord of the morning]

I use the standars Nvididia detonator 41.09 drives for my Geforce 3 ti 200 and it works fine, tha same for my other computers with Geforce 4Ti cards,, thats from http://www.nvidia.com

[Avenger]

A strange thing just happened to me. Yesterday everything was flowing just fine. And today when I started the computor, the res was down to a minimum and colors only at 256. Reconfig and restarted the machine - and to my big surprise the game ran terribly crappy AGAIN http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/eek.gif

Checked out my different settings, and saw that the virt mem that I had before on 1024MB now was set at 1

Changed it back to 1024MB, but still the fps is about 2, or something like that.... Unplayable.

Another thing I noticed was that at the intro, there was a very long delay (thought that it had freezed or something) before it started. After I changed the virt mem, the delay was shortened, but the screen blinks for 2-3 seconds (in black/pitch black) between menu, strategic map and battlescenes. Weird stuff ehh... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif

Anyway I´ve read a thread about the 30.82 detonator driver in the forum today, and will try them out. Don´t know if ot has anything to do with that at all, but its worth a try.

Anyone got any ideas.....

[Gregoshi]

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif That just isn't fair. Your description of the flashing screen during transitions sounds like what I see on my PC, only I have a Voodoo3 graphics card.

[SmokWawelski]

Gregoshi: Your card does not have any other problems? I had to plug the VD3 3000 into my box for now, and had to take a break from MTW as every 2D figure on the battle map is contained within a black box. The strange thing is that the game is not any slower than it was on GF2... I am using the generic Win2K drivers cause I need that card only until tomorrow anyway...

BTW, the GF3 drivers that my brother is using: NVidia 3.0.8.2. Hope it helps http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wacko.gif

[Old Bald Guy]

I upgraded to a GF3 ti200 in order to play the game, and glad I did. It runs fine in the battle scenes. However, does it take a LONG time for it to load the battles on everyone else's computer? Good for bathroom breaks, but not so good for flow. All the loading seems to take a long time.

AMD 850
384 MB PC133 mem
GF3 ti200

Best game I've ever played, and I'm an OLD BALD GUY. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

[Gregoshi]

Hello Old Bald Guy http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif Whether you are old, bald or even a guy (we have a few of them around http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif ), all are welcome at the Org.

OBG, what exactly do you mean by a long time? I'm guessing my battles load in 20-40 seconds, which can seem like a long time.

Smok, I don't have any problems that I'm aware of. I figure the individual men are probably not as detailed as someone with a graphics card made in this century. The strange thing is some unit types look every good with decent detail and other units look pretty crappy. I usually don't zoom in close so they all look pretty good from a distance. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[SmokWawelski]

Gregoshi, thanks for replay, but I am past that. It had to be the VD3 thing, since with the R9500 I am back to normal. I have tried the 1600x1200 with 4 players with no slowdowns.
Game is just great, so I am going to stop whinig http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

As far as video problems, it seems that not only the video driver is a factor with display, but other parts of the system that IMO should not influence the game. I had a dual boot machine with Server2K on separate partiotion, and this system does not work with Radeon for me....

So to summarize, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, except for stretch gloves... Good Luck friends

[Lord Of Storms]

Your problem might well be sound card related ,I had some problems with my initial set up of MTW poor framerates ,erratic mouse pointing, and sound probs. i.e. buzzing poor quality after some forum hopping and info gathering I made some adjustments like other replies to change the sound settings on the game itself helped alot I unchecked the hardware mixing box then turned sound quality down to med. this cleared up all sound related problwems as to the others I downloaded the MTW game patch updated my drivers to detonator 41.09 (I have a GeFORCE4MX440 vid card) also downloaded a nvidia vid card tweak program and voila the game now plays great hope this helped you some http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Avenger]

I´ve fixed the problem with the lagging battles again. Seems like my graph card by some weird circumstance (maybe the kids http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif ) had reset it to default settings.

Anyway in the GF 3 advanced options under Direct3D there is a box where you can change available ram for pci-device. This was by default set to 35 megs. When I put it down to 2 megs only, the battles worked fine again. Think all of it comes down to that crappy soundcard of mine (SB live&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif in combination with VIA mobo.

Still I have slow start ups on the OS and also loading of gamescenes, so I will change my drivers from 41.80 to 30.82 to check out the diffrence... You can always switch it back http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/tongue.gif

Have a nice day...

[Avenger]

I've now installed the 30.82 drivers, but the diffrence in gameplay isn´t very big. A bit better scrolling in both battles and strat map.

Also in the windows startup and application, it runs a little bit faster (not a lot).
Another thing that I´ve noticed is that in the DXdiag, when you test the Direct3D, the rotating cube works like a dream in DirectX 8, but in DirectX 7 it lags quite a bit. This was the case on the 40.80 driver as well, and I thought that maybe this is why windows is a bit slow ???? Donno.

Anyone had the same experience?