Demo is out

Saber Cherry · #1 October 30th, 2003, 12:07 AM

Try disabling sound, or updating your sound card drivers. I have a GeForce 4 4200, Athlon XP 1700+, and 512 MB DDR ram. I'm running XP Pro with all the latest updates, and... hmmm, several-month-old video drivers.

Basically, it sounds very similar to your system, but it flies on my computer. But then, what kind of GeForce 4 do you have? There are some discount models that have reduced functionality, and narrow datapaths...

At any rate, I suggest running scandisk, updating Windows (through Windows Update), defragging, updating your sound drivers, changing the sound mode (in the game) to waveout, possibly turning off the sound, and possibly disabling some features in your video card driver control panel. In that order. Good luck!

PvK · #2 October 30th, 2003, 01:41 AM

No luck. Turning sound off even doesn't help. It's actually not really bad in practice - just the 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. I think all the games I usually run use DirectX rather than OpenGL, though.

PvK

Phoenix-D · #3 October 30th, 2003, 01:42 AM

PvK, what else is on your system? I have pretty much the same setup, only with a 128MB card (its actually slower than your 64MB one though), and get around 50 FPS in the benchmark.

Psitticine · #4 October 30th, 2003, 02:02 AM

This is weird. I have just an old GeForce 2 in my older machine, and I can get 15 fps even with the settings on the high side of neutral. I'm just using the vanilla drivers and everything too.

Could it be a sound issue? Do you get any oddities out of the audio, and have you tried benchmarking with sound turned off? (pondering)

Saber Cherry · #5 October 30th, 2003, 02:03 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
PvK, what else is on your system? I have pretty much the same setup, only with a 128MB card (its actually slower than your 64MB one though), and get around 50 FPS in the benchmark.

What's the benchmark command?

PvK · #6 October 30th, 2003, 04:47 AM

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 · #7 October 30th, 2003, 05:35 AM

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.