Demo is out

[PvK]

Psitticine, yep I tried turning off the sound and it didn't affect the benchmark speed.

Saber Cherry, benchmark is a button available from the Options/Graphics/Battle Detail menu - press it and wait a few seconds for the FPS measurement to appear.

Phoenix-D, my system has a Sound BLaster Live Value sound card, a joystick, a printer/scanner, and a network card. Laser mouse. 256MB DDR system RAM. 1637 MB page file, mostly not used. I shut down practically every process besides the game before running. Windows reports 92-94% resources free. Runs practically all graphics pig games quite well. The machine isn't busy doing anything else - it's just taking forever to render these graphics, as if it is using a lame driver and/or not using 3D acceleration properly, or something. I notice too that the graphics of the magic swords and spears are "wiggly" - off every six pixels or so - does it look that way on your system?

PvK

[ October 30, 2003, 02:48: Message edited by: PvK ]

[LordArioch]

I'm not having as much trouble but I still wonder why my radeon 9600 pro runs normal battle detail at 14fps. This number doesnt change with changes in filtering or resolution strangely enough...but I can run Unreal Tournement 2003 at 45 fps max settings so I'd surely hope I could get a little more from dominions 2, seeing as how other people are getting 50 fps.
Low detail gives 25 fps and to get 50 i need very low detail.
I've got newest drivers and all that so it eludes me what the problem is. I blame opengl.

[Saber Cherry]

I got 33 in normal, 50 in lowest, and 15 in highest. I'm running high quality now at 25. Do the battles take longer at lower framerates, or do they take the same time but play more choppily?

[Phoenix-D]

"Phoenix-D, my system has a Sound BLaster Live Value sound card, a joystick, a printer/scanner, and a network card."

About the same as mine, except my stick isn't plugged in.

"Laser mouse. 256MB DDR system RAM. 1637 MB page file, mostly not used."

Close enough.

"I shut down practically every process besides the game before running. Windows reports 92-94% resources free. Runs practically all graphics pig games quite well."

Ditto..

"The machine isn't busy doing anything else - it's just taking forever to render these graphics, as if it is using a lame driver and/or not using 3D acceleration properly, or something. I notice too that the graphics of the magic swords and spears are "wiggly" - off every six pixels or so - does it look that way on your system?""

No, it doesn't seem to. Hmm..I assume you're using the latest drivers. Other than that, I'm stumped.

[HJ]

Hmm, I'm running old Radeon 7200 64MB on Athlon 800 with 256 RAM, maxed filter and normal detail, and the battles run at 14-15 fps - pretty decent. Don't Nvidia drivers have something to balance out the OpenGL performance, like choose between picture quality and performance? Maybe you can tone down something like that? Is there a way to adjust the hardware acceleration through software for Nvidia cards? Maybe this is toned down?

Do the battles take longer at lower framerates, or do they take the same time but play more choppily?

On low framerates (such as 4-5) they become choppy, but the difference between 14 and 30 is only in speed - arrows fly longer, e.g. but everything is still smooth.

Btw, filter affects the look of the unit sprites, while the detail level refers only to the background viewing distance, as far as I was able to tell. Is this true? If it is, than I don't mind running lower detail, since the units will still look their best with maxed filter.

[LordArioch]

If your framerate is low like mine is, you can use the w key as a battle speedup of sorts. They tend to run faster at 50fps.

[Pocus]

before installing a new driver, be sure to desinstall the old one, then reboot. Windows should switch to standard vga display then.

after doing that, install your new driver. If your official driver dont fix your problem, take an unofficial one at omegacorner.com

if fixed the problem for me, I downloaded an unofficial ATI driver, and now I have FPS wich shoot thru the roof!


edit :
http://www.omegacorner.com/index_nvidia.html

can do the trick

[ October 30, 2003, 06:27: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[PvK]

Thanks Pocus. I saw your post in the sticky thread about that site, and visited but haven't tried it yet.

Phoenix-D, what Version of DirectX are you running?

I figured out the wiggly swords problem. I had the "filter quality" video preference set to "None", in an attempt to improve frame-rate. It actually has no effect on my frame-rate, and when I turn up the filter quality, the wobbly swords smooth out nicely.

PvK

[Johan K]

Originally posted by PvK:
benchmark still shows 9.5 FPS, so I guess just the combat replays will be choppier than they should be. This system performs excellently with all my other 3D games. My video card is a pretty good GeForce 4, I think: Ti 4200 w. 64 MB VRAM, on AGP bus.

Your performance is defenitely lower than it should be on a system like that. Maybe it is some timer error, try to start the game with the --fps 100 switch and see if it makes any difference. My bet though is that your driver from nvidia hasn't been installed properly.

[Saber Cherry]

I should mention that the Nvidia drivers are hard to remove fully. Try this utility:

http://www.guru3d.com/detonator-destroyer/

It is designed to fully remove Nvidia drivers, and I always run it before I install new ones.