Game Performance

lazeez · November 12, 2001, 20:05

I'm having some interseting performance issues.

I have 2 machines: A Pentium III 850 Mhz laptop and an Athlon 650 Mhz desktop. When running on batteries, the laptop operates at 700 Mhz.

On the Athlon setup, scrolling, clicking on cities, moving units etc... is very slow. When clicking on the different advisors, it takes a long time (about 4 or 5 seconds) before the screen loads up. Everything seems to be slow. On the Pentium III laptop, everything runs as smooth and fast as can be, even when its running on batteries (700 Mhz).

The laptop runs on Windows 2000 and the desktop runs on Windows XP. So the bad performance on my desktop could be:
1. Because of the Athlon processor.
2. Because of the operating system (Windows XP).

Is anybody out there experiences bad performance on Windows XP or Athlon systems?

lazeez · November 12, 2001, 20:21

I should probably write down the specs for the 2 machines:

Athlon 650 Mhz
256 RAM
10 Gigs free Hard disk space
GeForce3 Ti200 with latest Nvidia reference drivers
Windows XP Home Edition
Very few background processes running (just the essentials)

Pentium III 850 Mhz
256 RAM
7 Gigs free Hard disk space
Rage 128 Mobility Video Chip
Windows 2000 Professional
Very few background processes running (just the essentials)

Dan Magaha FIRAXIS · November 12, 2001, 20:54

Quote:

Originally posted by lazeez
I should probably write down the specs for the 2 machines:

Athlon 650 Mhz
256 RAM
10 Gigs free Hard disk space
GeForce3 Ti200 with latest Nvidia reference drivers
Windows XP Home Edition
Very few background processes running (just the essentials)

Pentium III 850 Mhz
256 RAM
7 Gigs free Hard disk space
Rage 128 Mobility Video Chip
Windows 2000 Professional
Very few background processes running (just the essentials)

The latest Detonator drivers are brutally slow under XP and 2000. With XP you should be able to "roll back" to the drivers that shipped with XP (12.41, I think) and see a dramatic performance boost.

Dan

Venger · November 12, 2001, 21:00

Quote:

Originally posted by Dan Magaha FIRAXIS

The latest Detonator drivers are brutally slow under XP and 2000. With XP you should be able to "roll back" to the drivers that shipped with XP (12.41, I think) and see a dramatic performance boost.

Dan

Dan -

Is there a plan to work around this driver issue? A driver rollback gets us through in a pinch but isn't a long term solution...

Of course, NVidia could help...

I do run the 12.90 drivers under Windows 2000 and scrolling is pretty jumpy...

Venger

Dan Magaha FIRAXIS · November 12, 2001, 21:08

Quote:

Originally posted by Venger

Dan -

Is there a plan to work around this driver issue? A driver rollback gets us through in a pinch but isn't a long term solution...

Of course, NVidia could help...

I do run the 12.90 drivers under Windows 2000 and scrolling is pretty jumpy...

Venger

Due to the way some of the older game code was written, the game won't smooth scroll even under optimal conditions. Not much that can be done about that at present.

The other issue seems to be isolated to nVidia and we've been trying to work with them to figure out what's going on, but that's about all I know. I've heard rumblings that other games have had problems with the latest Detonators, so who knows. It could just be one of those weird realities of PC gaming.

Dan