[karjo238]

Hello there! I have recently finished putting together a retro Windows XP PC using this as a starting point:

https://youtu.be/-XTnL4Mang0

I have a geforce 8800 GTX, 8gb DDR2 Ram, 4x WD Raptor 10000rpm hard disk drives and a Sound Blaster X-fi sound card.

It's completely overkill, and I'm completely in love with it. I have a bunch of 2000s era games loaded up on it, and they all work extremely well, with the exception of FSO.

I downloaded the base game from GOG, installed it, and all is well. I then downloaded FSO19.0.0 (which I believe is the last XP compatible build), and then the MediaVPs 3.6.12.

When play vanilla FSO, the frame rate is fine, but as soon as I add the MediaVP, the frame rate just crashes through the floor. All the cutscenes and game menus work fine - it's just that as soon as you go ingame, the world slows right down.

The only thing I could think of was that OpenGL was not working correctly, so I tested that on my PC and got 3-400 fps on a OpenGL tester. Also, FSO states it is v19.0.0 OpenGL in the main menu, so all seems to be well there.

I'm sure I'm doing something obviously wrong, but i just can't see it right away. Can anyone help me shine a light on where to start troubleshooting?

[Mito [PL]]

To summarise it quickly, even remotely modern FSO builds (19.0 isn't that old tbh) with MediaVPs are going to be a challenge to any old hardware. Let's see, back in the day of MVPS 3.6.12 I was running a Phenom X4 9500 with a Radeon HD 5770 and it was... alright I guess? But then more demanding graphic options showed up in new builds, better models were introduced into MediaVPs and the setup started chugging a LOT. After that I had a small upgrade (jumped to a C2Q 9650 and an R7 265) but it didn't get much better.

Modern FSO features are definitely demanding a low to mid tier gaming computer nowadays.

If there's anything I could suggest is for you to check if you can disable shadows and maybe turn off deferred rendering.

[karjo238]

After a lot more messing about, turning off specular highlights solved the problem. I absolutely agree with what you say - it's just that I supposed I thought I had an ass kicking enough machine to be able to handle it.

Many thanks for the reply. I'll slowly work through all the options and try and get the balance of performance and graphical goodness sorted out, now I know how far is too far 👍

[Novachen]

What MediaVPs do you have installed?

So not only the version, the exact VPs would be helpful.
I mean even 3.6.12 mediavps had a mv_advanced.vp or mv_animglows. They can have a massive impact on weaker systems and consists of High-Res (Animated) textures.

If the performance is bad, first step should be to try out MediaVPs without the Advanced ones, so that the Low-Res textures are used, which should look also good.