CM running slow

[Bertram]

Hello,

I recently had to upgrade my system, and am now having some problems in CM. It does play, but performance went down (while I would have expected better performance).

I had a P2/400 CPU, with a Voodoo3, 16 mb video card. Intenal memory 128mb, running under Windows98. Performance was good enough, only in the largest games with all weather and smoke effects on there was some lag.

First switch was to a NVidia MX card. 32 MB memory. I got the latest drivers(22.40 currently?). First problem is that the night got real dark (that is my whole screen gets black), and only clears up if I turn of the wheather effects totally. Second is that now even the medium scenario's run jerky. Setting up a 2000 point battle is a chore, as the point of view doesn't scroll, but jump around.

Second upgrade was a new motherboard and cpu (had to, the old one broke). I run now a Celeron 900. Added some memory as well, and got now 256 MB. Ran the latest 4-in-1 drivers. This change didn't help any, it might have made things even slower (but that is difficult to judge).

I do run the game in 1000*800 resolution, and have some high res mods placed, but with my previous card that wasn't really a problem.

Any idea's would be appreciated.

Bertram

[Schrullenhaft]

The Celeron's have less L2 cache than the P2's did (128K vs. 512K), however the Celeron's cache runs at full clock speed of the CPU rather than half. Your motherboard is recognizing your Celeron as a 900MHz model correct ? The Intel CPUs are 'multiplier locked' which means that they have to be run at the correct Front Side Bus (FSB) frequency, which for the Celeron's at 800MHz and above is 100MHz (previous Celeron's ran at 66MHz - which would have your current Celeron running at approx. 600MHz).

When you installed the VIA 4-in-1 drivers what 'mode' did you install the AGP driver in (the default is typically 'Standard mode') ? Standard mode is equivalent to either AGP 1X or 2X. Turbo mode is equivalent to AGP 4X. While I've heard that there isn't much (if any) discernable difference between AGP 2X and 4X, there is quite a difference between 1X and 2X. I'd suggest reinstalling the 4-in-1 drivers and selecting 'Turbo' mode. Also make sure that you're installing the 4-in-1 v. 4.36 driver.

I'm not sure how much of a performance/feature benefit the GeForce2 MX family gets from the latest drivers, but you may want to try v. 23.10. The 23.11's are the latest, but your motherboard may have problems with them since it is based on a VIA chipset. The latest 4-in-1 VIA drivers may allow the 23.11's to work, but that may be a bit 'iffy', so I'd suggest sticking with the 23.10's.

If you have FSAA enabled (it isn't 'forced' on by default), that can cause quite a performance drop with a GeForce2 MX. Typically you would have to intentionally turn this on ('force on') in order for it to be utilized within CM and affect its performance. I assume that the resolution that you're running at is 1024 x 768. I don't know how much of a difference color depth may mean to performance, but CM only requires 16-bit color, so you could possibly reduce your desktop color depth.

You may also want to look over your CMOS/BIOS settings. The AGP setting is usually defaulted to 4X (which is what you typically want for a GeForce), but you'll want to check for this. There may also be setting for 'Fast Writes' which you may want to experiment with (when they're enabled they may cause problems, but they should increase performance). Also check for the AGP Aperture size, typically it will be 64Mb, but you may want to try to increase it to 128 or possibly even 256 if your BIOS allows for it. You'll probably want to check your memory performance settings too. Depending on the speed and quailty of RAM in your system you may be able to set the Latency to a lower setting (2 or 2-2-2, however your BIOS lists the adjustment).

You may want to check to see if your video card is sharing an IRQ with any other device (disregard any 'IRQ Holder for PCI Steering' device since that will accompany every PCI/AGP device).

You can get the drivers from here:

Guru3D - get the 23.10 drivers for Win9x/ME

VIA 4-in-1 v. 4.36

You may also want to get the 'GeForce Tweak Utility' to check out your GeForce's settings. Powerstip is a piece of shareware software that can also tell you about your current AGP setting, etc. (though you may have to pay the registration fee to get that functionality).

[Andrewguy]

I cant give you a answer but i had a problem similar to yours. About a year ago i got a geforce2 card and its performance was much slower than my voodoo 3 when playing combat mission (it also looked worse). This problem continued when i switched to an via based chipset from the intel one in my old computer regardless of what 4 in 1 drivers, nvidia drivers or nvidia tweak utilities i used. At that time the detonators went up to ver 12 and the 4 in 1 to 4.29. After joining this forum i found that problems with nvidia cards and cmbo were pretty common -but by then i had managed to pick up a voodoo 5 at a good price since 3dfx was folding.

The V5 has always run smoothly but if someone with a geforce 2 card and would post what driver setup works best for them i would be interested in hearing, and it would save you alot of time loading and reloading drivers to discover yourself.

Finally if you are in the process of trying out drivers you might want to download the a free program called "fraps" from the internet which will tell you your framerate as you play cmbo so you can tell immediately which setup is working best.

Good luck

[Bertram]

Thanks for the quick replies. I am off to do some experimenting.

Bertram

[SlowMotion]

Have you ran 3dMark2000/2001 or some other DirectX benchmarks? It would be easier for other people to know how much room for improvement there is if they knew your score. THat kind of number helps when you're trying to find out whether some tweak has any effect.