Herr Kruger Posted April 30, 2002 Share Posted April 30, 2002 Hi all, this question is not specifically for BTS but for anyone who frequents this Tech Support forum who cna help... first off, my system is a PIII 450 MHz, now woth 192 MB RAM and a 32 MB ATI card (alasm no cool fog)... I recently downloaded a scenario, the Berlin Get The Reichstag! one, and found when I was moving the LOS around it was very choppy, and thought that increasing my RAM from 64 MB to 192 MB would help but it didn't... I have a heavily modded CM and I guess now there is not much I can do to avoid this problemm probably in all larger CMBO and CMBB scenarios. Would getting another 128 MB RAM chip help you think? I don't know much about hardware and installing it, but financially getting a new system is not at all possible and getting a new video card probably not possible now or for awhile either... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agua Posted April 30, 2002 Share Posted April 30, 2002 Hmmmmm.... additional system memory never hurts, but even if you increase to 320(?)mb of ram, there still may be a bottleneck in your video card or your processor. There are some sites out there that tell you how to determine what the limiting device is, but I don't know what the addy's are. I'm assuming the ram is plain old pc100 or pc133, but 320mb of ram really should be enough memory, imho. On the face of it, a 32mb card for CMBO (though I've never had an ATI) ought to be good enough as well. If you haven't already done so, you ought to go download/install the latest drivers for you processor, motherboard, and video card. There are also some windows memory tweaks you can do, if you haven't already, that can provide some pretty impressive performance gains. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted April 30, 2002 Share Posted April 30, 2002 I would assume that this is most likely either the video card or the CPU (especially for LOS). Unfortunately ATI video cards (except the newest Radeons) aren't very fast and a scenario with a lot of buildings in it can be quite a problem when moving the camera around at certain view levels. When it comes to LOS checking the CPU becomes the most heavily taxed component of the computer. I'm not sure why a city-scape would be that much more problematic for LOS checks (since a lot of it would be blocked), but this seems to be the case. Load up the 'A Walk in Paris' scenario that came with CMBO and see how the performance is in that one. It may be very similar to the Berlin one you are attempting to play. Upgrading your CPU can be a fairly cheap 'quick fix' for your problem (though I'm not sure how much of a difference it may make for you). However, I'm not sure what your motherboard could take as an upgrade and what Pentium III CPUs are available in decent quantities (they are becoming phased out or not carried by quite a few retailers/on-line merchants). Your motherboard may max out with the 100MHz FSB Pentium III CPUs, which maxed out with the 800, 850 & 1000 MHz models (1GHz), but they may be somewhat hard to get (I have a 100MHz FSB 1000MHz PIII myself for one system). You'll have to check with your motherboard manufacturer to see what the maximum supported CPU is. To make this even more confusing there is a possibility that your motherboard could support a faster CPU than what is listed by the manufacturer. Often motherboard manufacturers stop actively supporting their older products and may list the maximum speed CPU that is not the true limit that is supported. While the documentation doesn't list it, some motherboards may automatically identify and work with newer CPUs (if their FSB will support it) because many of the PIII CPUs had 'multiplier' locks on them that prevented them from being overclocked by simply increasing the multiplier (i.e. - 450MHz = 100MHz FSB x 4.5 multiplier; you can't go to 550MHz by increasing the multipler to 5.5). Your motherboard may not report the exact speed correctly, but the CPU should still be working at its rated speed. Well, now that I've made that complicated for you. What you're seeing is most likely the CPU being bogged down (doing LOS checks). If you're rotating the map and not performing LOS checks and it appears 'jerky', then your video card is most likely to blame. You've probably seen quotes from others that a fast video card needs to be mated to a fast CPU and this is somewhat true. You can still see some benefits with a faster video card and the same CPU, but you don't get the maximum speed benefit of the faster video cards being mated to the somewhat slower CPUs (since the CPU becomes the bottleneck for video performance). [ April 30, 2002, 04:38 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agua Posted April 30, 2002 Share Posted April 30, 2002 Originally posted by Herr Kruger: I don't know much about hardware and installing it, but financially getting a new system is not at all possible and getting a new video card probably not possible now or for awhile either...Are you sure about that? There are some mighty low priced pre-made rigs out there nowadays. Look on e-bay. Hell, the other day Pz was trying to sell his 1.6Ghz AMD Thunderbird with an nVidia Ti500 card for $600 on this board. I would be surprised at all if you could find a P3 1Ghz with a 64mb Nvidia Geforce2 card for under $300 on e-bay. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herr Kruger Posted May 1, 2002 Author Share Posted May 1, 2002 Let's say anything over $100 is too much and take into account $300 US is like $500 for me [Cndn] plus whatever shipping etc plus the fact I am trying to save for something and help my mom pay her bills as my step-dad is out of work it is quite impossible.... I guess it is my video card (sigh) as my LOS is choppy without rotating the viewpoint at all... it's probably all the high-res buildings in that scenario... my brother played the Paris scenario and had little problems with it though. Thanks for all the help though, to you nice board people! Are there nice-looking low res buildings somewhere? J Kruger 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agua Posted May 1, 2002 Share Posted May 1, 2002 HK - Go to http://www.avondell.com It is a guy's personal home page. On the left hand side you will see a link to a section of his site named "WWIIOL TIPS AND TWEAKS". He provided those for optimizing folks machines to play the great mother of all resource hogs, world war II online. However, they are simple little memory, video card, and mother board tweaks (some of which may be inapplicable), that can improve performance substantially. On my old machine, after doing simply a static memory tweak, cleaning my machine of crap files, enabling direct memory access for my hard drive, and a couple of small registry edits, I saw over a 30% increase in performance with my video card as measured by the 3D2000SE Benchmark utility. There are a lot of sites with tons of tweaks to improve performance, but I recommend Avondell's site because he does a great job of providing step by step instructions with screen shots of each step. Not all the tweaks can be performed on all systems, but there will be some which are applicable to your system. His directions are so simple and clear that you really can't miss. See if it helps you. [ May 01, 2002, 01:24 PM: Message edited by: Agua ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olle Petersson Posted May 2, 2002 Share Posted May 2, 2002 How to speed up the graphics without altering any hardware or driver settings: 1) Use fewer high resolution mods, especially for buildings and terrain. (These chew up all your graphics memory.) 2) Reduce the screen resolution for CM. (My bet is that it's mainly your CPU that is the bottleneck, and speeding it up will increase performance.) Cheers Olle 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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