Canuckgd Posted January 2, 2005 Share Posted January 2, 2005 Howdy Gang, I just changed my video card out (as some of you know) from an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 to a Matrox G550. The latter is not a 3D card per se, but I got it mainly to do photo-editing on my machine, and that one would show fog in CM (which it does). I was under the impression that CM didn't use a lot of 3D in the game so I wasn't too worried about performance. Since I switched though, CM has slowed to a crawl on some of the larger battlefields, or where there is a lot of detail. I have turned off many of the graphics stuff in the game, but that really defeats the purpose of having got a card that will show those things. In the Operation I'm playing now, I had to finally reduce my screen resolution to make the scenario playable (in the higher resolution - 1280 x 1024, it would take 1 to 4 seconds after clicking on a unit for the unit to actually be selected). So, question is, will the video card make that much difference in CM (especially CMAK and CMBB)? My rig is a P4 3GHz, 800 FSB with 1 Gig of Kingston PC3200 DDR RAM with Windows XP Pro, SP2 for the OS. I will likely end up getting a new machine that's strictly used for gaming and probably will equip it with an NVidia card, but before I do that, I'd like to get to the bottom of this mystery so that I don't spend $700 on a video card that isn't going to make a difference . Thanks for any help/feedback. Glenn 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
junk2drive Posted January 2, 2005 Share Posted January 2, 2005 I have a PC with a Radeon 7000 64mb DDR agp card. Viewing the battlefield, scrolling across, can be jerky and slow on big maps with a lot of craters, or rain/snow. Calculation time for the green and blue bars is your CPU. Ram and video card memory only help to a point. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canuckgd Posted January 2, 2005 Author Share Posted January 2, 2005 OK, sounds like there's not a lot to be done. This is a really big operation mostly inside Ortona with lots of landmarks, zillions of houses, etc (it's a really impressive looking battlefield - Mike did a great job on this). OK, I'll see how it goes. At lower resolutions it does get playable, albeit still very jerky. Thanks junk2drive. Appreciate the feedback. Glenn 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted January 2, 2005 Share Posted January 2, 2005 Sounds kind of odd. I don't remember ever having problems with my G-400s and it's not that long ago. How big are these scenarios? Are you sure your AGP drivers (usually in the driver set for the mainboard) are properly installed? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TufenHuden Posted January 2, 2005 Share Posted January 2, 2005 Well overheating a labtop isn't good-just my opinion... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canuckgd Posted January 2, 2005 Author Share Posted January 2, 2005 Redwolf - this is Michael Dorosh's "Little Stalingrad" - the Ortona operation, and it is huge in terms of map size and object density. It's a city basically, with tonnes of buildings, trees, etc. I think the length is somewhere near 1500 metres or so. I believe the drivers are installed properly - I'm not 100% sure as I had the store do it, but these guys do professional setups for companies, and I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing (in other words, this wasn't installed at Future Shop ). The correct drivers come up in the Properties windows. Is there anything else I can do to check (run dxdiag for instance)? Glenn 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canuckgd Posted January 2, 2005 Author Share Posted January 2, 2005 I went one step further and reduced my resolution to 800 x 600, and things got much better still (although I'm wondering if there is a memory leak somewhere as it started off much faster than it finished). I suspect more than anything, I run at a higher resolution than most people in this game which is likely why other's may not have seen this issue with the CPU and RAM setup that I have. Stats show that most folks seem to run somewhere around 1024 x 768, and I suspect this scenario would tax that a bit (it does on my machine, anyway). So, I'll just run the heavy stuff at 800 x 600, and the lighter stuff at 1024. No big deal. Glenn 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted January 2, 2005 Share Posted January 2, 2005 How much video RAM does the card have and do you have antialiasing on (I think the matrox doesn't have it)? Maybe that massive scenario is just overloading it, I don't think I played anything that big. Regarding the AGP drivers, maybe somebody else can post how to check them on XP? I don't have XP. The device manager should have an entry for the AGP slot as such. It is not uncommon that people, even professionals ,forget to install AGP drivers. Because almost everytime the OS installation will already have working drivers for the AGP slot so that you only put the video card drivers on top. Consequently, if the OS doesn't have them they sometimes get forgotten. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canuckgd Posted January 2, 2005 Author Share Posted January 2, 2005 OK, the card has 32 megs RAM, and you're right, the Matrox doesn't have AA. I ran the dxdiag program and everything there checked fine, and it does have an entry for "AGP Texture Acceleration: Enabled" so I'm not sure if that means it's enabled IF there are AGP drivers installed, or if there have to be AGP drivers installed in order for that function to be enabled (I would assume the latter). It would be best though if I could confirm that the AGP drivers are installed in some other way. Thanks. Glenn 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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