Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: THE Phreak on February 06, 2007, 01:43:40 am
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It lags incredibly, memory wise, on this computer. I'm on 256mb with onboard gr4fx, and the memory lag alone makes it all unplayable.
The computer was free,so I'm not complaining. :D
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Seems to me you just did :p
A lot of people have this problem actually.
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I'm just fortunate I didn't have to pay for it.
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Chances are that if you get a cheap PCI graphics card and some more memory, you have a shot of running fs2_open, though I'd need some more specs to be sure.
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Celeron 2.93ghz
248mb of ram
integrated graphics.
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I can run WCS on Sony TR2A notebook. Specs are 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, integrated graphics. So, first of all, you need more RAM. That should do the trick :)
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I've seen SCP run on a comp with a 500mhz chip, 256 mb of ram and a 64mb graphics card, so it is possible! Granted a few of the graphics intensive stuff was switched off but it ran with very little lag after it was set up right. :)
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I've had luck playing FS_port, but that was after ending every other task.
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I ran the SCP on a Pentium 3 with a 500MHz processor and 256MB of ram. what really affects your ability to run the SCP is the video card. I ran it with a 128MB video card. The better the card the less problems you will have.
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Seriously... go spend $30 on an AGP or PCI video card, that's all you need. I ran this game on a GF2 MX400 32 MB card for some time. Even now, I've only got an ATI 9500Pro in this system.
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248mb of ram
The graphics card is using shared memory but only seems to be allocating 16 MB of memory to the card, see if you can bump that up to 64 MB in the BIOS, minimum.
Those are pretty crap specs to run a 3D game, but you might be able to do it if you add more memory and adjust the integrated card's settings, and dont' run the adv_effects at all.
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you'll probably need to ditch the media vps in order for it to run.
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lol, phreak and THE Phreak. that's gonna be confusing.
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I feel for ya. Im not sure my labtop will handel SCP either.
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248mb of ram
The graphics card is using shared memory but only seems to be allocating 16 MB of memory to the card, see if you can bump that up to 64 MB in the BIOS, minimum.
Those are pretty crap specs to run a 3D game, but you might be able to do it if you add more memory and adjust the integrated card's settings, and dont' run the adv_effects at all.
There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card, he would be able to run SCP with stable framerates quite easily. No adveffects, but that's not an enormous sacrifice.
Good grief, it wouldn't be hard to pick up a video card that'll run SCP well for cheap:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&submitsearch=Search&satitle=%22geforce+4%22+ti4600&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D2&sadis=200&fpos=ZIP%2FPostal&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search
Ti4600 will run the SCP with no problems. Radeon 9500Pro or 9700Pro is comparable. Hell, you might be albe to find an old 9800Pro lying around for cheap, and it'll do everything you could ever want (from the system you have). Newer nVidia FX cards are cheap, but they don't hold a candle to the slightly older high-performance cards.
Or, if he doesn't have an AGP port: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=108&subminorcatid=50 (those prices are CAD)
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There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card
Yeah. But he doesn't have a dedicated video card. He has an integrated Geforce4MX - that's a crappy Geforce2MX level 2 pixel pipeline processor with 64 bit memory bandwidth and 16 MB of slow DDR shared via UMA across the system bus.
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There's no might about it - with 256 MB dedicated RAM and a dedicated video card
Yeah. But he doesn't have a dedicated video card. He has an integrated Geforce4MX - that's a crappy Geforce2MX level 2 pixel pipeline processor with 64 bit memory bandwidth and 16 MB of slow DDR shared via UMA across the system bus.
Which is why I said he should cough up the $40 required to buy a decent video card that will play SCP, AND linked to a couple.
Hell, even an old GF2 MX400 card will run SCP better than integrated graphics. Integrated is good for nothing but actually having a monitor attached to your PC. And if his motherboard isn't a total piece of junk, it'll have an AGP slot. Even if it IS a total piece of junk he'll have a PCI slot.
There comes a point where you can only milk so much from existing hardware. This is not to say that you have to spend a fortune to upgrade your PC. Even a brand-new high-end AGP card can be had for $150 or less (frequently much less).
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You don't even need to look on ebay, actually. This (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814122205) will allow ancient computers to run FSO pretty comfortably for $30.
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It lags incredibly, memory wise, on this computer. I'm on 256mb with onboard gr4fx, and the memory lag alone makes it all unplayable.
The computer was free,so I'm not complaining. :D
Are you using the Media VP's or just the stock game with SCP exe's?
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SCP with mediavps runs fine on my PC after *major tweaking.* I have a Toshiba laptop with a 2.8 GHz Celeron chip, 736 MB DDR RAM, and an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7000 IGP. The major bottleneck for me may have been the front-side bus - Toshiba motherboards are crap.
I did several things to try and lessen the lag - first, I disabled the major framerate decreasing options in SCP (i.e. specular, environment maps, etc.) and enabled img2dds, bitmap caching, and vsync disabling. Then, I reflashed my BIOS and set my AGP aperture* to 64 MB (from 32 MB), which helped the performance somewhat. You might have a lot of junk hogging up free memory, as I did, which severely restricts performance. My solution was to restrict start-up and background programs as much as possible. I also disabled a lot of unnecessary Windows services (XenTweak (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mrx9000/) and Black Viper's WinXP Optimization Guide (http://martinz.wordpress.com/research/blackviper/) are very, very helpful and contain nifty tips/tricks)
I defragged my PC and generally cleaned stuff up that I didn't use. I also increased the virtual memory a whole bunch. Finally, I downloaded optimized Omega drivers for my video card and set specific OpenGL performance benchmarks for use with FSO (via the great ATI Tray Tools program by Ray Adams.)
Final results: The average framerate increased by 20fps, and I got (as a bonus) 70MB of more free memory. Hooray!... although I try not to look at an Orion in-game. Not because I'm intimidated by it or something, but because it slows down the game speed a hella lot.
*increasing the AGP aperture has been significantly tested (http://www.tweak3d.net/features/hardware/agp-aperture-size-examined) and should boost in-game performance. However, the ways by which you increase it may not always involve your BIOS -though they usually do. I, for example, have a ****ty ACPI Toshiba BIOS that doesn't have the option to increase the aperture, so I had to do it thru ATI's SmartGart.
P.S. I would try and optimize your onboard graphics card's performace as much as possible. What make is it again?
Look to http://www.driverheaven.net for more help. :)
EDIT: Links fixed
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You don't even need to look on ebay, actually. This (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814122205) will allow ancient computers to run FSO pretty comfortably for $30.
No, no it won't. It's a PCIe (PCI Express) card, and 99 percent of computers don't have it.
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Sorry, I clicked on the wrong one there. I meant this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814143058).
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actually i don't think he actually stated he has a geforce 4 mx anywhere. I saw this :
gr4fx
and made it up :D
(no need to write graphics like that btw)
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The major bottleneck for me may have been the front-side bus - Toshiba motherboards are crap.
More likely it was your video card - Mobility cards are generally handicapped compared to their big-brothers in a desktop system, and a 7000 series is old technology. Not to mention, your adjustment of the AGP aperture size makes me think your card was handicapped more than usual.
Your CPU and RAM are far in excess of what FS2 SCP requires. I run the SCP, with all mediavps except adveffects and both specular and glowmapping enabled and generally have steady framerates of 50-70 fps. This is on a 1.33 Ghz Athlon Thunderbird processor, 512 MB of SDRAM, and a Radeon 9500Pro 128 MB (AGP). Granted, I have my video settings heavily tweaked for performance. The bottleneck for my system is now, unfortunately, the CPU. It's possible that an upgrade to a 9800Pro might boost it somewhat, but probably not enough for me to go through all the effort.
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The major bottleneck for me may have been the front-side bus - Toshiba motherboards are crap.
More likely it was your video card - Mobility cards are generally handicapped compared to their big-brothers in a desktop system, and a 7000 series is old technology.
Your CPU and RAM are far in excess of what FS2 SCP requires.
Maybe, but I've worked with a lot of Toshiba notebooks, and even in non-graphics based operations they suck. I once made a comparison:
Specs:
Compaq 1.60 GHz laptop with Intel integrated memory, 512 MB ram, 60 gig hard drive with 400 MHz front-side bus vs a Toshiba Satellite 1.60 GHz with Intel integrated memory, 512 MB ram, 60 gig hard drive, unspecified FSB speed (usually 133 MHz or thereabouts)
Operations: Quake III Arena, network data transfer, hard disk write test...
Results: Compaq kicked the Toshiba's ass in all tests. I wish I had never bought my crappy laptop. Plus, their tech support sucks - the motherboard (on my current laptop) shorted out a while ago whilst still under warranty, and when I sent it in for repair in Louisville, it came back erased, with fingerprints and grease all over it and 512 MB of ram missing. I had a good fun time with that one ;)
So yeah, you might be right. But I've overclocked my Mobility and allotted more memory to it, so I figure that's the max performance I'll get out of it.
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Well I was hoping to get a brand new computer rather than souping this one up.
$600 will get me something good.
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Well I was hoping to get a brand new computer rather than souping this one up.
$600 will get me something good.
Hell, $300 got me a laptop capable of playing FSO at 60 fps with mediavps.
EDIT: Specs:
IBM T30 Laptop
Pentium 4 2.00Ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
768 MB RAM
40GB HDD
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I just tried it again with no media vps whatsoever, completely stock except for the .exe.
I've come to conclusion that the SCP is badly unoptimized. With the default FS2 retail, I play with good framerate etc. even with a few programs like winamp or whatever in the background. Just now I had the FS2 SCP running with all stock options (minus the launcher and 3.6.9 exe) and media yet it still lagged so badly I got a message from Windows saying Virtual memory was low, followed then by a crash.
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I have had kinda oppisite issues.. only with the retail exe. That is for me the SCP exes have generally functioned better (smoother gameplay) than the retail exes when trying those out in laptop
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I just tried it again with no media vps whatsoever, completely stock except for the .exe.
I've come to conclusion that the SCP is badly unoptimized. With the default FS2 retail, I play with good framerate etc. even with a few programs like winamp or whatever in the background. Just now I had the FS2 SCP running with all stock options (minus the launcher and 3.6.9 exe) and media yet it still lagged so badly I got a message from Windows saying Virtual memory was low, followed then by a crash.
yeah i highly doubt that is a problem related to SCP, but more likely an issue with your computer.
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Could it be an HT&L issue?
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That sounds like what it'd be.
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I just tried it again with no media vps whatsoever, completely stock except for the .exe.
I've come to conclusion that the SCP is badly unoptimized. With the default FS2 retail, I play with good framerate etc. even with a few programs like winamp or whatever in the background. Just now I had the FS2 SCP running with all stock options (minus the launcher and 3.6.9 exe) and media yet it still lagged so badly I got a message from Windows saying Virtual memory was low, followed then by a crash.
yeah i highly doubt that is a problem related to SCP, but more likely an issue with your computer.
+1
All bets point to mis-configuration.
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i agree. SCP 3.6.9 played fine (without mediavps) on my first PC (500 MHz eMachines Tower, 10 GB hard drive, 256 MB RAM, 66 MHz FSB, 4 MB onboard graphics).
And by "fine", I mean 25 fps on average. SCP certainly isn't "unoptimized." Did you try increasing the swap file size (as you say a "virtual memory" error pops up)?
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It plays pretty decently on a Dell Dimension B110 or 1100 (same exact thing, two different names) with 512meg RAM and Intel 865 integrated video. Sucks arse at OpenGL but does quite well with DirectX.
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Sucks arse at OpenGL but does quite well with DirectX.
It seems that this is true for most lower-end computers. OpenGL is not too well-liked by the bargain basement PCs.
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Sucks arse at OpenGL but does quite well with DirectX.
It seems that this is true for most lower-end computers. OpenGL is not too well-liked by the bargain basement PCs.
OpenGL runs fine on everything but integrated graphics.
I said it before and I'll say it again... onBoard video is good for nothing more than a monitor connection.
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Here, this was 2 hours of my morning today:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,45310.0.html
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YOu don't have to remove all the mediavps. The Mediavps you can use all the time are:
Music.vp
Core.VP
Nebulae.vp (Lightspeed nebula's)
Lightspeedfs2.vp (thats the improved campaign thingy)
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I've seen SCP run on a comp with a 500mhz chip, 256 mb of ram and a 64mb graphics card, so it is possible! Granted a few of the graphics intensive stuff was switched off but it ran with very little lag after it was set up right. :)
500 MHz AMD K6-2 (system board max=66MHz, overclocked it to 83 MHz x 6)
256 MB RAM
BFG 5500 256 MB OC PCI
-it runs slow, but with some options shut off, it does run! (It'd prolly run faster if it had a decent sound card that supported acceleration.)