Why can't my computer handle WW?

[blargue]

Hey guys. Great game. The only problem is that my computer doesn't seem to be able to run it at all. I have a Gforce 4 video card. I'm running XP. I have a P4 2.66. And I have 256 MBs of Ram. In other words, nothing special but well above and beyond what I should need to run it smoothly.

I run WW on the second lowest resolution it has available. I'm not running anything else at the same time. It's loading about a frame every 2 seconds.

Any ideas?

[Zogu]

Hmmm if you're running an anti-virus and/or a firewall, try to carefully turn them off for a few minutes. Then try running WW. Don't forget to turn your protections back on afterwards! Some crappy firewall programs are CPU hogs.

Otherwise, try to find out if there are some "hidden" programs or drivers eating up a lot of CPU. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and check the CPU usage, sort it by process. Anything special running in the background... an indexing process, a MP3 downloader, an unknown process, ...?

Run dxdiag and check your video drivers' compatibility; please provide your current DirectX version.

[Flashfire]

Just had the same problem with my computer at work. Fixed it by going into DXDIAG and ENABLING Direct3D and DirectDraw in the display tab. Give it a shot.

[blargue]

Argh! I tried those suggestions and nothing seems to help here. I checked the processes running (ctl + alt + del) and nothing peculiar showing there either. I tried updating DirectX to the newest version available too. No dice.

Any other ideas?

Thanks for your help by the way.

[Fingers]

GF4 should be enough to run the game, so it's some kind of a configuration issue. ZoneAlarm is known to have memory problems (on my laptop its memory usage slowly creeps up until it uses 2GB of memory...) but this sounds too drastic.

Do you have recent drivers for your video card? Is your desktop set to 32-bit color? Have you tried running with the -nosound command line option? Have you tried both windowed and fullscreen modes?

[Strider]

You might try turning off System Restore, also.
Start | Settings | Control Panel | System
Put a check on turning off System Restore.

[blargue]

Alas, it's not looking like it's meant to be.

[Shadowcat]

If upgrading your video drivers doesn't help, you could try downgrading them. Unfortunately the standard advice to ensure you have the latest drivers simply doesn't always hold true with nVidia, as they have a single driver to cover all their video cards, and newer releases almost always just focus on newer hardware, sometimes to the detriment of older hardware.

I also have a GeForce 4 (Ti4200), and the last good video drivers for my card under Win98 (which I run) was 56.64. Newer drivers invariably make my machine quite unstable.

A quick look at the nVidia forums suggests:
"43.03 was the most stable driver of its era." (link)
"66.93 WHQL drivers ... or even the good old 56.72 WHQL drivers" (link)

The latter being in connection with a GF4MX rathger than a GF4, but I suspect the 56.72s are the XP equivalent of my 56.64s so they are probably worth a shot.

[Brainiac4]

256MB of RAM is way low for running WindowsXP. Do you get reasonable performance in other games?

[senon]

has anyone found any new ideas on this problem? my computer is running with WinXP SP2, the latest drivers and a full gig of ram, but for some reason i'm falling below 10 fps even at low resolutions.

i've tried kill every other process, i've tried windowed mode vs. fullscreen. in every case, the framerate slows to a crawl the moment the shrapnel logo first pops up.

i've tried installing on a friend's much-lower-spec'ed laptop, and it worked fine with no framerate problems even with half the RAM and several other applications running in the background.

any ideas?

-senon

Athlon64 3000+
1.00 GB RAM
Radeon 9600xt