Performance issues

[Losfalos]

It's good to have people to chat to about this :-
Im having mouse lag problems on my battlefields where it's quite clunky to maneuver my men into position. The fps seems okay but its slow to get screen redraws when i move my cursor around (or witht he keyboard). My battlefield is set at 1024x768 and i tried turning off all the advanced options (size of units is default)

Im playing with typically 1,000+ men on my side and 2,000+men on the enemy side (most as reinforcements).

Okay so performance it relative - let's say smooth for me means something like Sacrifice.

Here is my machine: AMD Xp1800+ 256mb DDR RAM 20gb 5400 rpm hdd geforce MX400 64mb (ddr?... probably not http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/frown.gif).. Dedicated swap file partition 512 mb

How do you guys find it? Is there an fps button?
Maybe its the AI.. If i get a new super P4 maybe i can play MTW battles just like CNCRA that wud be ace.






lets see: my machine is super smooth with

[Knight_Yellow]

does the lag come with sound static?

if so its ur sound card.

id try downloading all the latest drivers for ur GFX card and other things.

[Stormer]

i have same problem, but KY might be right for once. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[LeeJackson]

Along the lines of yellow knights obseravtion. Your sound card and video card might be on the same IRQ. It happened to me once and caused all sorts of lag like problems with my games.

[Lord Of Storms]

Quote[/b] (Losfalos @ May 12 2003,09:05)]It's good to have people to chat to about this :-
Im having mouse lag problems on my battlefields where it's quite clunky to maneuver my men into position. The fps seems okay but its slow to get screen redraws when i move my cursor around (or witht he keyboard). My battlefield is set at 1024x768 and i tried turning off all the advanced options (size of units is default)

Im playing with typically 1,000+ men on my side and 2,000+men on the enemy side (most as reinforcements).

Okay so performance it relative - let's say smooth for me means something like Sacrifice.

Here is my machine: AMD Xp1800+ 256mb DDR RAM 20gb 5400 rpm hdd geforce MX400 64mb (ddr?... probably not http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/frown.gif).. Dedicated swap file partition 512 mb

How do you guys find it? Is there an fps button?
Maybe its the AI.. If i get a new super P4 maybe i can play MTW battles just like CNCRA that wud be ace.






lets see: my machine is super smooth with
Losfalos, Go into the Apothecary and look for a thread named Nvidia card settings optimized for MTW it will give you a good idea how to tweak the video cards settings for smoother play also are you playing the patched v 1.1 ? I have a Geforce 4 MX 440 and I had to tweak it a bit before getting smooth play I had erratic mouse pointing and poor fps after the patch and some tweaks all is well. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

[BDC]

It might be the Geforce mx 400, it is only sdr ram and really old. If the other stuff doesn't fix it, then it might be that. I would suggest upgrading it if you can. You are crippling your lovely processor

[Kraellin]

there's nothing wrong with the gf4 mx. i use one on my xp machine and it will run the game just fine. you just need to tweak a few things. look in the apothecary or do a search there. also check the tech library.

now, just cause i'm a nice guy, the two major tweaks you want to do first are, turn off sound acceleration in dxdiag and turn off anti-aliasing in your desktop\settings\advanced stuff. those two alone shld increase your fps by quite a bit. i'd also run the game in 800x600. the 1024x768 doesnt give you any more view of the battlefield and isnt that much of an improvement on the graphics. by turning that down you shld also pick up a bit of speed.

K.

[Losfalos]

Hi


Thanks for the tips I'm going to check out the apothecary more closely now and try combinations of your suggestions :-
Kraellin: my card's a GF2MX400. But ill definitely try off sound acceln and antialiasing and 800x600 instead
BDC: (sniff) my poor AthlonXP Im not certain if an upgrade to a GF4 will make a huge diff though...
Lord of Storms: yup im looking into the apothecary. Grats
Lee Jackson: Ur right My soundcard and nvidia are both using irq 11 Didnt think to look cos games worked fine and no ocnflicts reported Im nto certain if WIn2000 allows me to chg it though.
KY: No sound static but Lee Jacksons point may be related...

Actually, I thought Sacrifice looked more video card intensive than MTW. However, I think MTW chews up the processor cos it is writing so many more surfaces (maybe)? Compared to Sacrifice which is just using hardware effects with fewer moving objects...

Any of you guys running it under Win2000prof?

Thanks all. Im also going to look up linux for MTW (i bet it runs faster if it runs at all&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif

[Losfalos]

okie had a look at the apothecary and nvidia tweaking and systems upgrade and all.. nice stuff.

just wondering - as kraellin noted, swapping around all the nvidia card settings may optimise it for MTW but make it difficult for other games (like say umm... B&White, NWN and Homeworld?) to run smoothly and really nicely.

but i think its worth tinkering cos to have smooth battles wud be ace.

thx

[eXistenZi]

http://fraps.com/

[Kraellin]

you can change the irq's by moving your cards around in the pci slots. normally, the vid card goes in slot 1 for optimum use, unless it's an agp card. then it would obviously go in the agp slot.

also, the old standard for sound cards is irq 5. i think this is normally achieved with the sound card in slot 3, but it's been a while.

you may also have options in bios for changing these things. again, it's been a while since i've fooled with these. the simplest way is to just move the cards around in the slots.

K.

[LeeJackson]

You can also change IRQ through your system. Been a very long time since I have done it so some one else is goign to have to post on the how. basically what you do is you lock out IRQ 11 restart the comp and since no device can use 11 the sound and the vid card pick other IRQs. Then you open IRQ 11 and restart the comp again and hopefully one of the devices will jump back on. It can take a few tries to get it right.

[Losfalos]

Thanks LeeJackson and Kraellin

Yeah i looked up IRQ problems with Win2k on the web and boy did microsoft bungle AGAIN on ACPI. For the record here is the bug fix how to :-

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operati....74.html (http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Win2000/Q_20461574.html)

Your suggestions are good. But it seems that the cleanest way is to completely reinstall w2k with ACPI disabled
rant rant rant at microsoft

I think it will probably fix the lagginess in MTW but i cant do a reinstall cos i have proprietary stuff on my machine. I might have a stab at changing card slots or leejackson's idea.

i wonder how many mtw gamers give up on their w2k machine and mtw because of this problem. btw, winxp solved the acpi problem (so they say) so this hsould work fine with mtw.

[Kraellin]

thanks for the link, losfalos. i've added it to our list of helpful sites in the apothecary. i used their homepage though.

i read a bit of that article/topic. if you've only got the two devices on the same irq, i dont think you have to go and do a re-install. can if you want, of course, but with a little swapping, you shld be able to resolve it without having to go to that extreme. it's just that you have two of the most intensive devices on the same irq, not all devices on the same irq, which seems to be what that article was about.

now, here's a little tip about swapping cards that are already working. pull the card (power down first, of course), then go ahead and start the machine. do NOT put the card in a new slot yet. let bios and windows see that the card is gone. then power down again and put the card back in another slot and boot up again. sometimes windows cant tell that you've changed stuff if you do it all at once, or it gets a bit confused during the boot process. let bios and windows see that it's removed. then insert the card again and let it see that.

my personal opinion of the acpi stuff is that it shld have never been added to computers. it's always struck me as one of those add-ons that do little, klunk other things up, and is just something someone added as a bell and whistle to show how 'cool' he was by doing so. it was so bad on one of my other computers that i can only turn on the computer by turning on and off the power several times and sort of do a little dance to the microsoft gods while doing so. i had another one that wouldnt allow you to turn the bloody computer off. you could only put it in standby by hitting the power switch. had to patch the bios on that one to get it so the power switch would actually turn the bloody thing off. quite annoying.

also, that article you pointed to with the link reminds me of a problem another patron was having and got that message that is the title of that article. i think he finally got his stuff sorted out, but i forget what he did now.

windows xp does indeed handle this stuff much better than any previous version. i've had no problems with irq clustering or irq's in general with xp. xp opened the irq limits up big time. earlier versions of windows were limited to 16 irq's and therefore, if you had more than 16 devices, you had to share irq's. i'm not sure what the limit is in xp because i havent hit it yet.

the old standards were vid card in slot 1, sound card in slot 3, i think, and modem on 5, if you had a slot 5. this would then tend to put the vid card on irq 7 or 9, the sound card on irq 5, and the modem on the first available after 5...i think. it was a real oddball kind of thing. irq 0 and 1 were reserved for system stuff and if you had any legacy devices it got even stranger.

i had a sound card once that was just really finicky. it required being in a certain slot, but couldnt be in the slot next to the vid card, had some legacy drivers for running in dos and was the most frustrating card i've had to configure. i finally had to disable the dos drivers, put the thing in slot 5, disable onboard sound capability (and mind you, i didnt even have onboard sound; i just had to disable the capability for it) and again, do that little dance to the gods.

the basic fact is, a modern pc still actually is just a fancy 8088 machine with one hell of a lot of patches. little by little it's slowly losing this, but there are still a lot of leftovers from the old 8088 machines. if you ever get a highmem.sys error you'll know what i mean.

and folks wonder why their games dont work sometimes :)

K.