SEV question

[wilhil]

Hi all!

There seems to be a few new posts, is this still the place to post or have people moved over to the other forum?

Its been a while! I have had a lot of work and have not been playing games for a while.

I fancied a game of SEV and installed it on my new laptop, and am a bit worried.

My old pc (that I was using when SEV came out) had a Geforce4 mx 440 64mb... old, but worked! I can not remember having any problems with SEV, I remember having to wait about 5 mins between turns deep in to the game.. but I do not rembmer anything else.

My new laptop has a Geforce 8600MGS 512Mb, it is far better in every way to my older desktop (I can render about 3x the speed in 3DSMAX), however SEV runs so slow. I turned on FPS, and I get about 60 at the menu, but it drops to about 8 in game.... when I first get in to game it is around 20, but then after I click on any dialog (research, construction e.t.c.) it drops to the 8-10 and stays like that even if I come out of the menu.

I just downloaded a demo and I can run Supreme Commander with decent frame rate, so something must be wrong here.

I am using Vista ultimate x64 edition. Is there any compatibility issues?

Thanks

[Captain Kwok]

Vista is not so nice to SE5. it really kills its performance.

---

Spaceempires5.com is the most active community at this time. Spaceempires.net is probably a bit busier with on topic SE posts as well.

[Fyron]

This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with still posting here, of course...

Vista does not have true DX8 support, and essentially emulates the function calls, through the DX9 emulation layer. Most games written with DX8 do not run that well in Vista, including SE5.

[wilhil]

Ok,

Next question, is there anything I can do?

SEIV works fine on this laptop, I love that so I will play that in the mean time, it is just annoying not to have SEV as I have not played a game from start to finish due to work!

[Captain Kwok]

One item that helps Vista SE5 performance is disabling "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts", which can usually be found under the appearance tab (in effects) of the Display Properties dialog.

[Timstone]

I have Vista Premium 64 bit, but fortunately for me I don't have problems. The only thing that's a bit uncomfortable is that I can't run any other program in the background, it makes SE V blink in rapid succession. Like a strobe-light.

[dmm]

I was going to make a snooty comment about 8 bits per byte naturally going with octal, but quickly realized that made no sense whatsoever. However, 8 bits goes well with hexadecimal. (Hex has digits 0 through 9 and then A through F, for a total of 16. That's probably as many digits as humans can comfortably handle.) So 8 bits per byte is 2 hex digits. A standard old-style keyboard had 26 lowercase, 26 uppercase, 10 numbers, 10 special characters, a space, a tab, and a return. That's 75 different characters, so ASCII code needed at least 2 hex digits. I'm guessing that was the driving force to have 8 bits per byte for PCs.

They could have used 3, 6, or 9 bits per byte, and then only used octal. But 3 is clearly too small to be useful, and 6 can't cover ASCII. (2^6 is only 64.) 9 bit bytes are overkill for ASCII.

[Baron Munchausen]

OK, maybe I am remembering WORD size rather than byte size...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_science)

In computing, "word" is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. A word is simply a fixed-sized group of bits that are handled together by the machine. The number of bits in a word (the word size or word length) is an important characteristic of a computer architecture.

The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation. The majority of the registers in the computer are usually word-sized. The typical numeric value manipulated by the computer is probably word sized. The amount of data transferred between the processing part of the computer and the memory system is most often a word. An address used to designate a location in memory often fits in a word.

Modern computers usually have a word size of 16, 32, or 64 bits. Many other sizes have been used in the past, including 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 39, 40, 48, and 60 bits; the slab is an example of an early word size. Some of the earliest computers were decimal rather than binary, typically having a word size of 10 or 12 decimal digits, and some early computers had no fixed word length at all.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Plus, transistors.

2->4->8

Or, that's my guess, although I know very little about hardware architecture.

[MrToxin]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
Plus, transistors.

2->4->8

Or, that's my guess, although I know very little about hardware architecture.

Ultimately, it grew out of using electrical current to fuel memory. Magnetism could be used as well, but we'll stick with the electricity. A "bit" represents the smallest form of memory available, which is 0 (zero current) and 1 (non-zero current). If there was any measurable current, the value was ON or 1 or TRUE, depending on what you wanted to call it.

Things just got more complex from there. Because bits have 2 possible values, things just double in size as they progress. This is why if you look at the amount of actual bytes in a memory stick is never exactly what they advertise. If you measure things in binary terms, a kilobit is actually 1024 bits (2^10).

With a little math, one will find that a 512 megabit stick of RAM contains 536,870,912 bits of storage (actually, I stole the number from Wikipedia so there. ) That IS a power of 2.

At this point, I'm going to quit because delving into how memory works and all that funny computer architecture crap is weird and sort of makes your brain snap in half. I hate thinking about it so I'm not going to type about it. That gets into memory addresses and, as a silly little human organic brain owner, I have trouble thinking about ways to organize half a billion bits. Computers do it nicely, though.