Very bad framerates?

[Trib]

Hi all

I have Athlon 1800XP, 512MB RAM, 68GB of spare HD space (UDMA100),
Geforce 128MB FX5200 graphics etc. Not top spec I know but I would have thought it would run reasonably.

I brought TOA and loaded it the same day our servers upgraded to 1.68 so cant say which started to cause problems, but when I first go to an area, the framerate goes red and the disk drive is hammered for about 30 secs and I can simply do nothing. Once this has passed, everything is fine, TOA water with lovely reflections, shadows on 5 nearest, clip set to far and no frame ratetroubles whatsoever.

Then I'll do something like be in thid and swim across the water to the keep, get out the otherside and red framerate for 30 secs while the disk drive is hammered again, and I simply cant more or do anything while it's happening.

I've tried turning down clip and turning off shadow but it still does the same.

Out of frustration I tried loads of online tweaks etc and got in a bit of a mess so reformatted the hard drive, reloaded XP Pro, loaded latest Nvidia drivers etc but the problems still there.

I wouldn't have thought it graphic cardrelated as it displays new trees, waters with beutiful reflections of the trees in them etc with no framerate probs whatsoever, it simply seems to take forever to load each new area from disk?

I've checked bios, disk is running as UDMA100, I am totally open to suggestions as I'm sick of dieing in thid while I have no control. It happens everywhere, not just thid, I port to goth and for about 30 secs, red framerate. I stand still for ages till the red goes greren, then the entire area is fine?????

I've tried defraging disk, after I reloaded XP etc I defraged before loading TOA, when that didn't work, I defraged after TOA again no luck.

help eagely appreciated.

Note, Drive formatted to NTFS

Many thanks

Trib

 

[Fana]

I would say its probably the new water that is to much for your gfx card. A fx5200 is simply not a very powerful card - an old ti4200 beats it in raw power for example. The only thing it has over the old series of card is dirextX9+ hardware support, but since it lacks the raw power needed to use those effects it still comes out short in that departement.

I would recomend turning off the ToA water if you havent already tried that.
Also 512 ram is a bit on the low end for ToA, but it should be less of a concern since lots of ppl run it fine on that afaik. Its probably a combination of low-end gfx card and low'ish ram.

Maybe just maybe it could be your hd getting old and slugish as well? They do have a limited lifespan and perform worse the more they have been used (altho this takes a long time to noticably affect them).

Guess its not spyware/trojans etc since you have reformated etc - altho it *can* still be: some stuff will keep downloading to your comp if your ip adress is known and open. Your running some sort of firewall i assume?

 

[Asharith]

Turn off Alliasing water and shadows

 

[Trib]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I have tried on Classic water with shadows disabled, atlantis trees disabled and atlantis terain disabled but it makes absolutely no difference

While I do realise my card is a low end card, it does seem to handle TOA water effects with the reflections set at their highest settings without making any difference to the framerates. The problem I'm having is there whether they're enabled or not and if for example I go somewhere where there's no water and then run to somewhere where there is water, the 30 sec pause might be before the water is in view, then when the water is in view it looks beautiful, nice rippling effect with the trees reflecting off of it and the framerate on green and no pauses.

If I then try the same thing with minimal settings, I get the same pauses but ugly water etc

HD isn't that old and was reformated.

Firewall/virus/anti trijan/adaware all running. (note for the purpose of experimentation I tried loging innto TOA without firewall etc but problem still there)

It seems rather than GC related that it's more likely to be page file/ram related as I the hamering of the disk drive when the problem arises.

thanks for the suggestions

Trib

 

[Trib]

Turn off Alliasing water and shadows

Thanks for the suggestion, I hadn't tried turning off Aliasing. I just tried it but no difference

best

Trib

 

[Pogel]

If you're running Windows XP switch your DAOC short-cut to use NT4 compatibility (from Properties...->Compatbility tab)

 

[Svartmetall]

I would say its probably the new water that is to much for your gfx card. A fx5200 is simply not a very powerful card - an old ti4200 beats it in raw power for example. The only thing it has over the old series of card is dirextX9+ hardware support, but since it lacks the raw power needed to use those effects it still comes out short in that departement.

Agreed. I have a GF4 Ti4600 and TOA runs (when I'm not getting my weird lag problem) sweet as anything.

XX2200+ CPU, 768 MB of PC2100 RAM, ASUS A7N8X mobo.

 

[Moriath]

you have fulll pre cache turned on .. maybe why your drives thrashing loading all the textures into swap file on the hdd everytime you go to different areas etc .. try turning it off if its on

 

[Trib]

I've fixed it, but rather than do the propper thing and try one change at a time, I changed 4 things

First I changed to run in NT4 compatible mode
Then I turned off the indexing service to the drive
Then I created a fixed size page file,

but just before I got around to trying it, my other half came home and as it was raining we both went to pick kids up from school. During trip I persuaded her to let me buy another 512MB ram which I purchased on the way home

Put the ram in and now all works fine with TOA water on highest reflection quality, TOA trees, TOA terain, clip plain on far and shadows on nearest 5.

Framerate now perfect (well new area flashes yellow for about a second)

Thanks for all help and advice

best

Trib

 

[Pogel]

LOL, some people don't do things by half

The RAM is a wise investment in any case, but I know from experience (and that of a number of guildies) that the NT4 hack makes a big old difference. You should change it back after 1.69, btw, as Mythic said in the 1.69 patch notes that they fixed the probem that the NT4 hack was working around.

 

[Jaem-]

buy me more ram toooooo, wamnna make daoc moveh ;<