Opengl Fps Problem

ShadowSlay

<div class="IPBDescription">flashlight/gernade issues</div> This is so annoying, i hope someone can help...
I run NS in OpenGl and everything goes fine, i get alot of fps(about 50-60), and everything looks the way it should. but as soon as i turn on the marine flashlight or a gernade goes off around me my fps drop to around 5! i have dynamic lights turned off already and that doesnt seem to help at all. does anyone know anything i can do??

im running...
pentium 3
1400 ghz
384 ram
32 meg intel video card

~thanx~

Soylent_green

*points at video card*

Unless it is a software problem, which I doubt(have you got the latest drivers for the graphics card?), then it is in all likelyhood the graphics card as that processor is quite nice, as for the RAM it is probably sdram-133 which will limit the bandwidth somewhat.

Try poking around with software settings first to see if it is the graphics card and if anything can be done about it. Lower the resolution to something really really low, does that help alot? If it is the graphics card and not a bandwidth limitation or something else it should help.

OK some tweaks you try, going into custom---> advanced and setting high detail particles to unchecked and dynamic lighting to unchecked. Now... unchecking dynamic lighting seems not to do anything because shooting will still act as a light source that only shines on other models, this is heavy and unwanted. Also set r_dynamic to 0 in the console as I noticed just unchecking use dynamic lighting in the custom---> advanced menu did not do this. r_dynamic 0 still does not address that firing the gun is a light source. It does however effect the way light from phasegates are treated, it now emits static light on world polygons and dynamic on models instead of dynamic for both. That's pretty much all you can do with the lighting and effects(the heavy stuff), you could also get low poly models for NS but if the server requires model consistency then you would not be able to play on that server so this is not preferable(it should help though, less entity polygons lit up by the light source, gun fire or whatever). Since you are running OK otherwise there is not much else to tweak, changing gl_texturemode to gl_nearest_mipmap_nearest will get you a 1 % increase in performance and a 500% decrease in image quality so don't touch that <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->. You can try running in 16bit color mode if you aren't allready, should make a pretty descent difference without being too ugly.

That graphics card is integrated, yes?, integrated graphics have allways sucked, they still do albeit a little less. If that motherboard has an AGP slot that supports at least AGP 1.0(1x and 2x rates) then I would recommend some cheap part from nvidia, the geforce ti-4200 with 64 MB is a good performer and supports dx-8 which might be somewhat useful if you intend to play HL2, which you should be quite capable of with HL2. I do not know if the card is fast enough for use in HL2 with some of dx-8 eye-candy on, it might not be, but that integrated graphics will have no chance at all of playing. At about half the price and half the performance and no dx8 support we have the gf4 mx440(a geforce 2 super duper ultra is a better description really.). Even a tnt2 m64 should be a lot better than that stuff, and I'm sure you could dig one up really REALLY cheaply, something like 20$ or less if you poke around.

looking at newegg for some descent price info, a gf4 mx440 with 64 MB ram costs about 50 $. A tnt2 m64 costs 24$(AGP version, getting a PCI version is more expencive and only meaningfull if you don't have an AGP slot). You could probably get one for something like 5-10 $ from a friend or second hand if you can find it, generally second hand is a bad idea with computer hardware but in this case it would probably be oh so cheap.

agp 3 uses a lower signaling voltage and I think most of these cards will be non-backwards compatible with your board, or I might have it confused(motherboards with AGP 3 slots being incompatible with old cards and not the other way around). Any way I don't think a radeon 9600 pro or a geforce 5200 fx or something such would work with that board. A tnt2 m64 will definetly be compatible if theres an AGP slot and all things PCI likewise. I used to use a tnt2 m64 about 9 months ago on a pIII 600 MHz with 320 MB cl2 pc100 sdram, it worked somewhat OK, and if you can find one really stinking cheap it could be worth a try. I later swapped that card for a gf4 MX440 and the CPU became the limitation at 1024x768.

When I first got my new comp I bought the graphics card from else where and I was stuck with my gf4 mx440 for a few days, it ran NS at a constant 100fps with vsync on at 800x600 no problems what so ever. This is about as fast a card as you could need for playing NS at a normal resolution without AF or FSAA or other eye candy. So if you don't care too even try and play ut2k3, HL2 or other newer games then by all means a gf4 mx440 is good enough for all things HL and the bottle neck will probably end up being CPU or memory latency/bandwidth related instead.