Framerate questions

[Oakleif]

My sytem is set to:
AMD Athlon 1.1 GHz
768 MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600XT with 128 MB
Windows 2K
DirectX 9.0c
1280x1064, 32 bit, 70 Hz

I run the game with default video options as modified below: (0% is slider full left, 100% is slider full right)
windowed mode
max performance for graphic and texture detail
max framerate smoothing
animation LOD on
terrain clutter off
nighttime brightness 0%
player light sources mine only
max characters to display slider at about 10%
max low detail characters to display 0%
max placeholder characters to display 0%
max view distance (default was about 20%) 40%
terrain texture detail shows blank
terrain level of detail enabled
terrain level of detail switch distance 0%
enable character geometry level of detail
character level of detail quality 0%
enable character texture level of detail
character texture level of detail quality 100%
do not display all equipped items on other characters
enable world level model of detail
cloth simulation enabled
shadows off
enable decals

EDIT: Oh, I also found the max fps setting in the prefs and changed that to 40 as suggested in another thread.

With this setup, I generally get 8-12 FPS in towns or busy places like Aug Mines, and about 15-18 FPS in wide open places. After about 10 ports I'm down to 2-3 FPS and need to relog.

What changes could I make that should improve graphics without decreasing FPS?
What settings could I change to try to increase my FPS?
Is there one (reasonably cheap) change to my hardware that would that would help? ie: up my ram perhaps?

[Death-knell]

Windows 2K? Didn't know games would run well on that OS?

Don't know the settings that well myself, I've heard of people having problems with under a meg of ram though.

[Menkure]

Win2k is great for running games.

Oaklief: Are you experiencing a lot of hard drive thrashing? I noticed you didn't say whay type of HD you had.. is it SATA? IDE?

Sata is a lot better than IDE drives. Also, if you have your worldcache on the same drive as your windows swap file.. (having them both on C: ), it can cause the system to pause while it waits for your HD to catch up.

If that's the case, something you might want to try is this thread in the Technical Forums:

http://community.istaria.com/Web/Sho...?PostID=112456

-Menkure

[Tzael]

There's nothing that stands out as being an ill-advised choice with regards to your game configuration settings, so I paid attention to your hardware list instead.

Upgrade that Athlon, if possible pick up an AMD Athlon 3200+ (Barton core), they're dirt cheap now and are the best 32bit CPUs available from AMD. Don't go for one of the 32 bit Semprons with the socket A packaging, they're inferior to the Bartons.

Don't worry if your current motherboard can't run the new CPU at full speed, simply run it at the best speed your motherboard can support. As an example, an Athlon 3200+ runs with a FSB of 200MHz and a clock multiplier of 11. Older motherboards might only support a max of 166MHz FSB, so instead of the CPU running at 2.2GHz, it will run at 1.8GHz (equivalent of an Athlon 2600+ or thereabouts). Regardless of whether your existing motherboard can allow the CPU to operate at full speed, it's still a vast improvement over your existing CPU.

Right now your CPU is your biggest bottleneck. You could choose to go for a whole new motherboard / memory / CPU combination and spend a small fortune, or you can seek out the CPU I mentioned above and spend around $50 total fora decentimprovement to your computer's overall performance.

I hope this helps a bit, let us know how you get on.

[PJ]

The biggest change from your settings that I can see, that would improve performance is a drop in the view distance.



If you just want to make the game look better at similar fps, You might try upping the quality of your textures. The different settings don't seem to have much of an impact on fps for lots of people.

[ssylva]

Your biggest problem by far is RAM ... When I upped from 1 gig to 2 gigs of ram, things became a lot better in game...

The other thing you want to do is upgrade your video drivers.

One final thing is defragment your hard drive if you havent lately...

[Runtus]

The 1.1 GHz Athlon I believe uses the old 760 chipset. Not sure how much luck you will have finding an upgrade CPU for that chipset. If you upgrade your CPU, it will need to have a new motherboard I'm afraid.

Your motherboard probably still uses the old SDRAM types, so prices on those will depend on the supply, which is like not very high nowadays. Adding at least another 512MB should give noticable improvement. This would be your cheapest alternative IMO.