Game specs and performance: all M2TW owners post here

[andrewt]

Pentium 4 3GHz
1Gb RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 128 DDR RAM

Battles run fine. Sieges starting from large town and castle (dunno if regular castle or wooden castle) lag really, really badly. Everything on the lowest settings. Shades and everything off. 1024x768. Recommended is medium settings and lots of things on. I actually run fine on those settings. I just reduced the settings for siege battles but they still lag me.

I tried both the newest ATI driver and the newest Omega driver. Still laggy.

[AussieGiant]

Hi All,

Information for anyone running a Nvidia 7950GX2:

---------------------------------

The 'new' 93.71 WHQL drivers also have a bug in regards to clock speeds on the GX2 and possibly SLI systems in general...

For example, if I use 'coolbits' to overclock the memory of my GX2 it reports it as follows:

Core Clock 500MHz
Memory Clock 1400MHz

Now, if I check Everest Ultimate Edition's status of my GPU's one card is listed as 500MHz core and 702MHz (1404Mhz Effective) memory whilst the other GPU is reported to be 500MHz core and 600MHz (1200MHz Effective) memory.

I know one card is indeed running the memory slower than the other because if I perform several benchmarks (such as HL2: Lost Coast etc) with one GPU on 1200MHz memory and the other GPU on 1400MHz memory I get about 3-4 frames per second slower performance than with both cards memory set to 1400MHz (using RivaTuner to 'fix' the memory clock speed issue) and then verifying the speeds again in Everest.

However, as soon as I reboot the PC, Cool Bits (since being modded by Rivatuner) and 93.71 have an issue and the memory speed of both GPU's is only 300MHz (600MHz Effective) and performance takes a huge dive

So I have to go back into the Nvidia Control Panel and set the memory clocks back to 1400MHz manually, but of course I'm then back with one card on 1400MHz (Effective) memory speed and the other back on 1200MHz (effective) memory! And no, don't tell me the clocks are correct because if I run several different tests with one card's memory slower (1200MHz) than the other (1400MHz) the performance is consistently slower than with both cards running at 1400MHz.

At the end of the day I simply don't trust the 93.71 drivers and I know that RivaTuner does not work correctly with them, so for me it was back to 91.47 WHQL as at least I know they don't have any problems in regards to clock speeds/tweaking!

I really hope nvidia and/or Unwinder and his fantastric Rivatuner software sort this bug out soon... perhaps we need another driver release?

The good news is that my GX2 runs just fine on the 'old' 91.47 WHQL drivers, and I've kept the updated SLI profiles from 93.71 too.

Regards,

Greggy

-----------------------------

[jabo0511]

Gateway Intel e-6400
2GB 533MHz RAM
7600 GS 256MB

I run on everything on the highest setting, bloom on except shadow on medium.
1024x768 resolution.

Smooth as silk.

[Garnier]

Ok the past few days I've figured out how my system can run the game looking best without lagging it. And now I've discovered something that totaly makes the game better. Yesterday I was playing with the first set of settings, averaging 12-18 fps. Now I use the second set, and the game looks a LOT better, just without blood or mud(which I can live without), and I can use bigger unit sizes, AND I'm getting 18-26 fps average, which makes it smooth. The main difference was taking off shader 2, grass and vegetation. Now I can use high textures and unit detail, plus AA.

[The_Pope]

AMD ATHLON 64 3800+ processor, Socket AM2 dual core

D Socket AM2 mainboard, nForce 550 chipset, 2GHz HyperTransport,
2 x Legend 512 MB DDR2 SDRAM PC6400 - 800MHz
160 GB Seagate hard drive

All option are max.

Not sure what resolution i set it at, but its on 22inch LCD.

Nice and Fast

[AussieGiant]

Gateway Intel e-6400
2GB 533MHz RAM
7600 GS 256MB

I run on everything on the highest setting, bloom on except shadow on medium.
1024x768 resolution.

Smooth as silk.

Booo!!!

Good for you Jabo...I'm not happy though, as you can imagine.

[Whacker]

Whacker you're depressing me!!

Good evening my friend! Glad to see my efforts are paying off here, I aim to please!

The 'new' 93.71 WHQL drivers also have a bug in regards to clock speeds on the GX2 and possibly SLI systems in general...

Ahhhhh..... OK. Let me throw out a number of thoughts and some possible advice on the whole Nvidia/ATI thing and Nvidia SLI. I'll try and keep this brief as I know the topic is system specs and performance, but this shouldn't be too far off the mark. Others can throw in their thoughts as well.

Before I get too deep into this, a quick background on myself. I've been building my own PCs for about 12 years now so I'd like to think I can at least talk with some reasonable intelligence on this subject without sounding too stupid. In terms of video cards, I've owned essentially nothing but Nvidia cards since my TNT replaced the old Matrox + Voodoo2 setup I had back in the day. I've had a TNT, TNT2, Geforce2, Geforce3, FX5200, and now my 2x6800 Ultra's. I am by not means an Nvidia fanboy, I just bought what was the most powerful card (in my view) at the time, or in a few cases I just wanted a real cheapo upgrade to tide me over for a bit, hence the FX5200. Am thinking hard about going with ATI my next upgrade cycle in about 1/2 year, but I'd like to see what they can throw up against Nvidia's 8x00 gen cards which are looking pretty impressive.

Now, my thoughts, primarily on Nvidia. Nvidia and ATI each have their strong points when it comes to keeping their drivers up to snuff with modern games, and in terms of recent and older game compatability. I see you've got a real nice new system with that 7950GX2 card in it, which I've read is fast as all get out, BUT it's got a huge number of problems in terms of the reference drivers. If you go back and look at the past 6 WHQL driver release notes, you'll see a ton of bugs introduced and fixed each time for both SLI systems with any SLI card setup, AND moreso for the 7950 series. There are a ton of games that won't work right on the 7950 series, it's getting better over time but you're still going to see that, hence why I'm not surprised you saw that for M2TW. I'll offer that you shouldn't worry too hard about this, even though the 8x00 gen is out, the 7950 is still cadillac class and the last thing Nvidia wants is people who've shelled out the big bucks for that to have a card that doesn't work well and isn't well supported on modern games. Also the Nvidia SLI is still a mixed bag, for the most part it's now a "mature" technology that they've ironed the kinks out of, but it's still got a few teething problems and the developers don't always know how to write well to take advantage of this. Another glimpse into the "bugs" section of the driver release readme will show that there's a hefty amount of "this is a developer problem, not a driver problem" issues. I've experienced my fair share of these with my 6800's in SLI.

The other major aspect for me (and I imagine others) is recent/older game compatability. Nvidia and ATI both kinda stink here, but it would almost seem that ATI is doing a better job of it as of late. I can think of a handful of games that are pretty broken on my Nvidia systems now running the latest drivers over the past year or so. I've experienced the "low earth orbit APCs" bug in Mechwarrior 3, which my friends on their ATi systems don't have. KOTOR2 has been broken for the past 4 driver releases on all Nvidia SLI systems, if you start the game with AA enabled it crashes. You can enable AA in game and it works fine, but every time you exit you have to manually edit the .ini to disable AA. Barf. The original MTW runs like total crap (pun intented) on my hefty SLI system, the campaign map is dog slow. There's a thread around here stating that the 61.xx drivers will help fix this, the problem being that anyone with an Nvidia card past the 5x00 series can't use them, because iirc the 6x00 series cards came out with the 7x,xx forceware drivers and hence are supported with those on up. I've also had a number of really weird crashes on the campaign map in MTW that I can't pin down, some research seemed to blame this also on Nvidia drivers. My friend running his ATI x800 doesn't have this problem at all, MTW runs smooth as butter and doesn't crash at all.

Please take this with a grain of salt, this is just my experience and thoughts on the matter.

The bottom line to you Aussie is, well... hang in there. Your video card *is* relatively new, and as such is going to have the usual teething problems. I personally would only recommend you use the WHQL drivers directly from Nvidia.com and NOT anything from Dell. However, if you see a beta driver release on nzone.com and the readme seems to indicate that a specific issue for you might be fixed, by all means snag it. I've just noticed that the non-WHQL drivers are often indeed unstable, certain games will bring this out more than others. Also don't be afraid to get the word to Nvidia about your issues if some troubleshooting can't pin it down. They have a forum, and there's a site feedback link (that appears to be busted now).

Good luck!

[Dr3x4L]

Intel Extreme X6800 2.93Mhz, Evga Nforce 680i, BFG 8800GTX Sli, 2 Gig Corsair Dominator Xms2, Western Digital Raptor 150GB x2 ,Gigaworks 5.1 Thx, X-fi Fatal1ty, 24" Dell Widescreen 1920x1200.

Running @1920x1200 Huge Armies 8XAA 16x AF Maxed out.
Fraps says its running at 999Fps but i dont think thats true but it dont slow down. :) Come to think of it nothing does.

[wzup]

AMD Athlon 64x2 5200+
2gb PC3200 (4x 512mb 400mhz DDR SDRAM)
500GB SATAII/7200RPM 8mb cache HDD
ATI RADEON x1900XT 512mb PCIe 2xDVI ViVo
Sound Blaster X-fi Fatal1ty
DiBoss 23" wide LCD (crappy resolution 1360x768 )

I´ve put all settings on high and everything runs smooooooooothly

[Dan.o6]

AMD Athlon 64 3700+
1.2GB RAM
nVidia Geforce 7950GT XT 512MB PCI
19" LCD @ 1280x1024

everything runs perfectly smooth, although the inevitable lag during HUGE 8 player 16 unit battles is still there

[AussieGiant]

Good evening my friend! Glad to see my efforts are paying off here, I aim to please!



Ahhhhh..... OK. Let me throw out a number of thoughts and some possible advice on the whole Nvidia/ATI thing and Nvidia SLI. I'll try and keep this brief as I know the topic is system specs and performance, but this shouldn't be too far off the mark. Others can throw in their thoughts as well.

Before I get too deep into this, a quick background on myself. I've been building my own PCs for about 12 years now so I'd like to think I can at least talk with some reasonable intelligence on this subject without sounding too stupid. In terms of video cards, I've owned essentially nothing but Nvidia cards since my TNT replaced the old Matrox + Voodoo2 setup I had back in the day. I've had a TNT, TNT2, Geforce2, Geforce3, FX5200, and now my 2x6800 Ultra's. I am by not means an Nvidia fanboy, I just bought what was the most powerful card (in my view) at the time, or in a few cases I just wanted a real cheapo upgrade to tide me over for a bit, hence the FX5200. Am thinking hard about going with ATI my next upgrade cycle in about 1/2 year, but I'd like to see what they can throw up against Nvidia's 8x00 gen cards which are looking pretty impressive.

Now, my thoughts, primarily on Nvidia. Nvidia and ATI each have their strong points when it comes to keeping their drivers up to snuff with modern games, and in terms of recent and older game compatability. I see you've got a real nice new system with that 7950GX2 card in it, which I've read is fast as all get out, BUT it's got a huge number of problems in terms of the reference drivers. If you go back and look at the past 6 WHQL driver release notes, you'll see a ton of bugs introduced and fixed each time for both SLI systems with any SLI card setup, AND moreso for the 7950 series. There are a ton of games that won't work right on the 7950 series, it's getting better over time but you're still going to see that, hence why I'm not surprised you saw that for M2TW. I'll offer that you shouldn't worry too hard about this, even though the 8x00 gen is out, the 7950 is still cadillac class and the last thing Nvidia wants is people who've shelled out the big bucks for that to have a card that doesn't work well and isn't well supported on modern games. Also the Nvidia SLI is still a mixed bag, for the most part it's now a "mature" technology that they've ironed the kinks out of, but it's still got a few teething problems and the developers don't always know how to write well to take advantage of this. Another glimpse into the "bugs" section of the driver release readme will show that there's a hefty amount of "this is a developer problem, not a driver problem" issues. I've experienced my fair share of these with my 6800's in SLI.

The other major aspect for me (and I imagine others) is recent/older game compatability. Nvidia and ATI both kinda stink here, but it would almost seem that ATI is doing a better job of it as of late. I can think of a handful of games that are pretty broken on my Nvidia systems now running the latest drivers over the past year or so. I've experienced the "low earth orbit APCs" bug in Mechwarrior 3, which my friends on their ATi systems don't have. KOTOR2 has been broken for the past 4 driver releases on all Nvidia SLI systems, if you start the game with AA enabled it crashes. You can enable AA in game and it works fine, but every time you exit you have to manually edit the .ini to disable AA. Barf. The original MTW runs like total crap (pun intented) on my hefty SLI system, the campaign map is dog slow. There's a thread around here stating that the 61.xx drivers will help fix this, the problem being that anyone with an Nvidia card past the 5x00 series can't use them, because iirc the 6x00 series cards came out with the 7x,xx forceware drivers and hence are supported with those on up. I've also had a number of really weird crashes on the campaign map in MTW that I can't pin down, some research seemed to blame this also on Nvidia drivers. My friend running his ATI x800 doesn't have this problem at all, MTW runs smooth as butter and doesn't crash at all.

Please take this with a grain of salt, this is just my experience and thoughts on the matter.

The bottom line to you Aussie is, well... hang in there. Your video card *is* relatively new, and as such is going to have the usual teething problems. I personally would only recommend you use the WHQL drivers directly from Nvidia.com and NOT anything from Dell. However, if you see a beta driver release on nzone.com and the readme seems to indicate that a specific issue for you might be fixed, by all means snag it. I've just noticed that the non-WHQL drivers are often indeed unstable, certain games will bring this out more than others. Also don't be afraid to get the word to Nvidia about your issues if some troubleshooting can't pin it down. They have a forum, and there's a site feedback link (that appears to be busted now).

Good luck!

Whacker,

Maaate, thanks for the information, I really appreciate it.

You've confirmed what I have investigated on numerous sites. It took a hell of a lot of reading to find out but it is great to have it all crossed checked by yourself. Thanks for helping.

I never use the Dell drivers except for their proprietary Motherboards. I always go to Nvidia and use the latest one's there.

I do believe you are correct and I have to make sure someone gets to hear of this. Who and where do you recommend I inform of this issue?