Okay, this is bizarre...

[xxxdjxxx]

I have just upgraded my Radeon 7200 drivers to the latest Catalyst version. I had been having graphical distortions with several of the other versions of drivers before these, but these finally look great. I tested the drivers in the demo first and I get an average of 45-65 FPS in the game inside the building and out. Then I tested multiplayer and got FPS of 40 to 60 with 8 bots. So finally I tried the single player campaign and the world fell apart. As soon as the cut scene ended I was looking at 1 to 5 FPS. Now here is where I was really surprised. I could walk into the room with the secret right at the beginning and walk up to the back wall, my FPS would jump to 90 to 110 I could back up a few steps and I would still get 80. I could turn to the side of the room and get 65 to 75 turn around and face the door and then I would get 25. Then I would walk back outside and I was back to 5 FPS.

 

Here are the settings that I use:

 

GL Extensions – ON

Video Mode – 800x600

Color Depth – 32 bit

Full screen - ON

Geometric Detail – High

Texture Detail – Very High

Texture Quality – 32 bit

Texture Filter – Triliner

Detailed Shaders – ON

Shadows – Simple

Video Sync – Off

Dynamic Lights – ON

Wall Marks – ON

Anistropic Filter – ON

 

My system has the following specs:

 

PIII 800 mhz

ATI Radeon 7200

384 MB ram

Windows XP Pro

all the latest drivers...patches...etc...

 

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to fix this situation?

[Datheus]

I dunno, I don't know alot about video cards, but I can tell you this much, high geometric and texture detail is like a smack in the face to your video card.. try lowing those first..

 

 

Or just switch everyhitn to 'Fastest' preset, and just gradually work your way up from there

[xxxdjxxx]

I have tried lowering all my settings and working my way back up, but even at the lowest quality/highest performance settings I still only get about 15 FPS max while outside of Kejim base. Once I go back inside my FPS goes back through the roof. Some tradeoff...graphical problems on the old drivers or poor FPS on these drivers. I even tried re-installing the game, but nothing changed. It just seems strange that my only problems are in single player and not the demo or multi player.

[CoreyGH]

I also have an original Radeon and was having similar problems. Kick ass framerate and then suddenly unplayble crap because of a seemingly arbitrary viewpoint change. But none of the same problems in MP

 

Try this. In the "More Video" section, change your shadows to either none or simple. Something is screwy with the volumetric shadow implementation. And it's not an ati problem cause they used to work fine in 1.02. Now, for some reason, whenever you look at something (no matter how far away) that casts a volumetric shadow (NPCs, You in 3rd person) it seems that it tries to cast a huge shadow over everything (your whole view gets a bit darker) and that, of course doubles the number of passes or some crap like that since it has to draw the world, and then draw the world with a shadow over it.

 

Anyway, that should work.