Help For Fps On A Pretty Good Comp
Lone_Isle
Join Date: 2003-11-24 Member: 23484Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-11-24 Member: 23484Members, Constellation
in Tech Support
<div class="IPBDescription">should the fps be this low?</div> Hi I have an Intel Celeron 1.7 GHz with 256 mb of RAM(dunno whether it is DDR) and a Geforce 2 MX/MX 400 video card.
I'm not exactly competent when it comes to reading comp specs but this one i'm using right now (in China) seems to have the same basic specs as the one i own back in Aus. The motherboard is from some nameless company whose website is no longer online.
The problem is that NS seems to be running at half the fps i get from the machine I have in Aus.
I've downloaded and installed the latest directX and video card drivers ( i think it was called Nvidia force something something ... -_- ) and that is more or less all I can do with the extent of my technical knowledge.
The fps right now hovers around 20-30 and is noticeably less smooth than the 50+ fps i get back at home. There also seems to be a slight delay in response time from my mouse. I've already tried 800 *600 and will try lowering it soon but that would start making the game choppy. Help please <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
I'm not exactly competent when it comes to reading comp specs but this one i'm using right now (in China) seems to have the same basic specs as the one i own back in Aus. The motherboard is from some nameless company whose website is no longer online.
The problem is that NS seems to be running at half the fps i get from the machine I have in Aus.
I've downloaded and installed the latest directX and video card drivers ( i think it was called Nvidia force something something ... -_- ) and that is more or less all I can do with the extent of my technical knowledge.
The fps right now hovers around 20-30 and is noticeably less smooth than the 50+ fps i get back at home. There also seems to be a slight delay in response time from my mouse. I've already tried 800 *600 and will try lowering it soon but that would start making the game choppy. Help please <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
Clock frequency is only a relevant messure of speed when comparing otherwise identical hardware(for example a celeron 1.7 GHz with a celeron 2.4 GHz), but even then it is not clear that clock frequency is proportional to performance, with celerons it tends not to be the case as they have to wait more and more for memory reads instead of doing something usefull if they are running at a higher clockspeed(because they can't keep everything they access frequently inside the cache memory on the CPU die which has very low access latency, they have to read it from RAM which is comparatively very slow).
Never the less, Half-life is probably less cache sensitive than new games, so it is probably not that bad a processor for Half-life and it's MOD's. If your framerate does not get better when you turn the resolution down or if your framerate is all over the place allthough what you are seeing does not change(for example, stare at a wall and your framerate varies up and down erratically from 20 to 60 FPS) then you are likely CPU bound. If it is processor bound try disabling some dynamic lighting effects, there really isn't much else you can do.
256 MB RAM could easily be too little if you run lots of sevices and stuff in the background, HL tends to use ~100 MB when it has as much memory available as it could wan't. If you wan't max performance from HL and MOD's you should have something like 100 MB free when starting HL. If you see that you have little free memory close some irrelevant or useless programs/services before starting HL and see if it helps.
If it is graphics bound(with that graphics card it may well be), turning down the resolution will help, reducing texture filtering quality in the control panel will help(very much a last resort IMO), it can be turned down even further in-game with gl_texturemode gl_<some mode_mipmap_<some mode>(replace <some mode> with linear in both occurances for best quality and with nearest in both occurances for best performance allthough it looks absolutely hideous), turning off detailed particles in NS will help, turning of vertical sync might help if you can stand the frame tearing.
Make sure anti-aliasing is off or application preference in the control panel, make sure anisotropic filtering is off or application preference(both these are quality settings and slow things down considerably on a geforce MX, AA tries to get rid of jaggies and AF tries to filter textures differently depending on the angle towards the screen to avoid textures getting blury when they are almost perpendicular to the screen, such as floors.)
The latest video card drivers are not allways the best for old hardware, but I have little experience with nvidia drivers and I could not suggest any which might have better performance.
no not neccessary, that just furthre lowers the image quality. To solve your problem, go get mothreboard chipset drivers for your mothreboard. that will fix it.
Thanks Mantis for the suggestion but the website that supports my motherboard isn't online anymore.
I read around some more and tried the vsync thingy. I turned it off by default, and also set my graphic settings to performance from quality.
I also turned off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filter from app. pref.
The fps is now a smooth 70 fps while only dropping to around 20 as the lowest when there's alot of stuff on screen. Most of the time it's around 40-60. I'm pretty happy since the mouse responsiveness has also improved <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->