Performance tweaking guide.

[WhiteChedda]

This is a general performance guide for those having frame rate blues.

 

 

First thing first, I am going to assume you know how to find out the basic information about your computer, even if find out means going to get the geek next door and asking him to tell you.

 

That said, you should

 

1. Upgrade drivers, if any, for your motherboard. this is particularly important to via chipset users on win 9x and w2k systems. XP at least came with drivers, albeit they are old now, for motherboards using via chipsets. You can get offical 4-n-1 drivers from http://www.viaarena.com or several other sites if you want leaked versions.

 

2. Video card drivers: Yes keeping up with the times is a good idea, though Kenn from Raven claimed the newest detoantor's should not be used in a previous post. That said, don't just install the drivers and go, investigate any settings they offer, especially under Opengl. For instance, setting the verticle sync option on the detonators to ALWAYS OFF will take care of some of you who keep saying your seeing 60 FPS no matter what resolution.

 

Sound card drivers: Yes upgrade these, these can take up a lot of CPU resources with bugs in some of the older SB Live drivers for sure, not sure about Aureal card drivers issues.

 

Network Card, if you have one upgrade its drivers, won't effect single player, but multi is a different story.

 

Background apps. press CTRL+ALT+DEL [NT based os's now click task manager and then the services tab] make sure you don;t have anything running needlessly. For Win 9x users, technically the only thing that has to be running is explorer and systray, anything else can be end task'd, but keep point32 and type 32 if you use a MS mouse or MS keyboard with extra buttons.

 

Heat: If you seem to be having unexplained slow dows, check the heat of yout video card and CPU, if it feels VERY warm to the touch, your cooling is not adequate. This can lead to slow memory access [reduced framerates] and even instability [lockups].

 

Defragment, even you NT users should be defragging your harddrive after you install any new game/program and at least once a month outside of that.

 

Swapspace, make sure you have enough, I would estimate that physical ram + virtual ram should equal no less than 512 MB.

 

another consideration is AGP apeture, this should be set to NO MORE than 1/2 your phyical RAM. IE on a 128 MB system AGP apeture should be no more than 64, it CAN be less, try different values and see if any help.

 

You can try a variety of other small tricks as well, like setting your system up to have a primary role of file server under my computer Properties>Performance tab> File system.

 

Last trick, this is a Q3 based engine which means it has one or more pak files, in this case 2 with an extension of pk3. These are compressed data files that store everything from sounds and textures to map and model data. This means whenever your computer needs to read these files, it must uncompress them first, this is ineffecient but at the same time your taking up less space on your hard drive. you can however extract the files into the base subdirectory of your install path, where you will find them, as long as you specify toe folder names" and then move the 2 pk3 files to another folder, if you do not move them the engine will ignored the decompressed files and continue using the pk3 files. However, keep the pk3 files in case you find your system becomes erroneous for some unforseen reason, and its very likely raven's patches will be looking for those pk3 files in the base directory to install, so you'll be moving them back if that happens.

[WhiteChedda]

Also note heat effects your video card, you can check it by touching the ram, or graphics chip [or in most cases part of the heat sink/fan on the chip, but don't be stupid and stop the fan]

 

Did anyone find any of this useful, and please if you have other tricks contribute..............

 

BTW the extracting the pk3 files reduces load times too for those of you complaining about that. You can also delete the pk3 files and then retreive them off the CD later, but Ihate copying files from a CD larger than 100MB myself, too damn slow.

[freonsmurf]

Yes this helped me out I have a low end system. Just opened the pak files, unzipped using winzip in the base directory, then defrag and it helps with load time and performance

 

now whats up with the autoexec.cfg that is missing?