Display & Other Problems

[Edi]

I've got a display problem with my Dom2. I upgraded my OS to WinXP from Win98, and it seems like Dom2 does not use the system refresh rate of 84 Hz or 85 Hz, but instead seems to be using just 60 hz, which is a bloody pain on the eyes.

Additionally, the game has slowed to completely unplayable. Scrolling does not work except in fits and starts and after long delays. Exiting from any menu or window only happens after a 5 second delay. I've no idea what's wrong, does anybody else?

System specs are Celeron 500, Matrox G400 on WinXP Pro, 256 MB of memory.

Edi

[Boron]

dominion seems to need lots of resources .
i have win xp too but fortunately a quite new pc .


if i play though sp and go to the point of insane wishing / battles etc. with hordes of units i have to wait 5-10 minutes for a new turn being generated .
furthermore i have the ati graphics card problem in battles .

when i run dominions twice , e.g. for sp testing and for taking my turns in mp it gets unplayable even on my only 3/4 year old pc .



since windows xp needs more resources , mainly RaM i guess your pc is now slightly too slow .



2 ideas : first try running dominions in windows 98 compability mode .
if this doesn't help :
install windows 98 again too .
each time you want to play dominions you boot then with windows 98 and for everything else you boot with win xp .


i was not able to find anywhere the system requirements of dominions 2 .
johan or kristoffer could you please post them for edi ?


i guess mainly your RaM and your processor are a bit too slow for windows xp AND dominions 2 .

edi what kind of RAM do you have ? i guess a very slow one

[Edi]

Ah, thanks, I suspected it was something like that. Crap. Typical Windows XP.

Well, not to worry, I'll be sorted in a couple of weeks. I'm going to get myself Mandrake Linux 10 Powerpack Edition (the store was out of them, they get more in a week or two) so I'll just install that on the 10 GB of unpartitioned space I've got and install Dom2 on Linux. Having an OS capable of taking advantage of both Celeron 500 processors (I've got a double processor board and a spare Cel500) should also help.

What kind of RAM do you have?

SDRAM, 100 MHz bus speed. My system is four years old, so it tends to have problems running newer games.

Edi

[Chazar]

As I said somewhere else before: I am running Dom2 on an old 600Mhz machine with an old GeForce2MX pretty fine & fast. The problem usually lies within the bad OpenGL Drivers under windows (since windows promotes DirectX instead). Use third-party drivers. This helped me to get it finally going on my newer 2GHz/ATI machine.

[PDF]

Chazar said:
As I said somewhere else before: I am running Dom2 on an old 600Mhz machine with an old GeForce2MX pretty fine & fast. The problem usually lies within the bad OpenGL Drivers under windows (since windows promotes DirectX instead). Use third-party drivers. This helped me to get it finally going on my newer 2GHz/ATI machine.

Do you have some links to get some 3rd-party OpenGL drivers ? I'm still unhappy with a 2.4GHz rig w/Radeon 9600 having comparable perfs with Dom than my previous 500Mhz/GF2 ...

[reverend]

I usually use the Omega drivers. They are available for NVidia and ATI at www.omegadrivers.net

The refresh rate under OpenGL is a windows / driver problem and has nothing to do with Dom2 itself.

[Chazar]

PDF said:

Do you have some links to get some 3rd-party OpenGL drivers ? I'm still unhappy with a 2.4GHz rig w/Radeon 9600 having comparable perfs with Dom than my previous 500Mhz/GF2 ...

I use the Omega-Drivers that have been pointed to by others already. Runs pretty well with ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility.

[Cainehill]

From what I saw at work, 256 megs is on the low side for WinXP; at least, Windows 2000 bogged down with only 256 megs, and Microsoft tends to always demand more resources and memory with each new Version.

It's also quite possible that you need to grab and reinstall the newest video drivers for your card under XP.

[Maltrease]

Their is also a HUGE difference between upgrading an older OS to XP and formatting the drive for a fresh XP install.

XP can actually run very well on older computers if you take the time to remove unnecessary services and disable all the fancy UI elements.

[Edi]

Upgraded, as in wiped the old OS completely clean and installed a fresh XP from scratch. I am not a total idiot, after all.

Anyways, it seems to have been the native XP drivers that were the problem. Installing the new ones from Matrox fixed most of the offending issues. Scrolling is now almost smooth and almost as fast as under Win98, and the refresh problem has been halved, i.e. it only hurts the eyes half as much as before the new drivers, so it's tolerable.

Thanks, guys!

Edi