Need suggestions getting my FPS up

[Darth_Pb]

It's awful right now-

 

voodoo5 AGP

128 RAM

450mhz p2

running in 800x600

 

anyone have any suggestions?

[BooJediHamster]

Buy a better system.

 

Seriously this is a very power hungry game and I feel the minimum spec they put on the box was a tad optermistic to say the least.

[wade]

download and install "Wicked GL"wicked gl download

[Guest CptBiggles]

More RAM is always good. I'm looking into it myself. The video card could use some juice. Perhaps look into overclocking it. (if you feel safe about that) I need to get a new one myself. (P3 450, 128 Meg RAM, Voodoo 3 2000 PCI...I'm a sad panda...)

 

And, honestly, for the sake of framerate: Go 640x480. It sucks, I know, but for pure playability, especially for large open areas and MP, kick the resolution down, turn off the wall markings, and *maybe* bump down the poly-detail. Low quality sound also picks up the pace a bit, but I can't stand the sound of it myself.

 

The best part about playing things in lesser detail on a lesser system - you get all the goodness of the gameplay, and then when you upgrade your system and kick the game's settings up, it's like you got a brand new game.

 

Captain "I...th...Yeah, yeah...that blob right there is a Stormtrooper..." Biggles

[Pa3PyX]

Yea, I am playing myself on a PII-350 with 224M RAM and Voodoo 3 3000 overclocked to limits, but still getting 5-6 fps at times (e.g. Artus Mines start). The following:

 

1) WickedGL will only slow down your FPS, not spped it up, but may eliminate some severe glitches (like missing screenshots and extremely long loading times). Also, remember that when you change OpenGL drivers, all graphics settings are reset to defaults.

 

2) Set world polygon detail (roundness, in plain English) to minimum: (in console) r_subdivisions 2048

 

3) Set model polygon detail to minimum: r_lodbias 3 (you may want to set it back to 0 in cutscenes).

 

4) Use lower server frame refresh rate to consume less CPU for processing game data and leave more available to do the rendering: seta sv_fps 10; seta cg_smoothplayerpos 0.75 (defaults are 20 and 0.5, respectively. Note that this will also increase the overall latency (ping, if you will)).

 

5) Turn off the music: s_musicvolume 0; s_allowdynamicmusic 0

 

6) Disable marks on walls etc.

 

7) Disable vsyncs (both in the game and in your 3Dfx Tools control panel (Glide/OpenGL section), as well as do some other tweaks there).

 

8) Needless to say, quit any background apps (especially P2P file sharing stuff, antivirii).

 

9) More RAM should speed up game loading times and reduce hard disk access, but I think 128M is enough. If you upgrade, simply buying more memory might be a waste since you probably have plain DIMMs. If you upgrade, get a new mainboard with either Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, those use a different type of memory (Athlon MB's can use plain DIMM's, but would benefit from DDR memory, performance-wise). Pentium 4 uses its own proprietary memory type.

 

10) Lose Windows 2000/XP; for your system, use Windows 98 Second Edition instead.

 

11) If in severe need, switch lightning to vertex instead of lightmap (but it will look NASTY).

 

12) Play in first person mode (one less model to draw).

 

13) Set fov (field of vision) to a lower value (default 80 degrees): e.g. seta cg_fov 60; this will limit your view angle.

 

14) Use lower texture detail - will only help if your card is running out of video or system memory trying to accomodate all textures (should not happen with anything below the highest detail), otherwise will not affect performance.

 

15) If using default 3Dfx drivers, set lower resolution (as CptBiggles suggested), e.g. 640*480. Note: if using WickedGL, that really does not matter - your FPS will be better in the areas where it's already high, but will remain the same in slow areas - because the CPU/Memory are the limiting factors in your system, not the video board.