Problems... any help appreciated

Gar Trueluck · Post by **Gar Trueluck** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:13 am

hello everybody, I've enjoyed this board quite a bit recently. I want to pose a question though about game performance. I find that after about 20-30 min. of gameplay that my system begins to crawl through battles and maps. This is very frustrating because its a Pentium 4 1400mhz 128rdram. I'd hate to think its the P4 processor. Is anyone else experiencing this? I've downloaded the patch w/ no appreciable difference. Ive set graphics/gameplay settings on avg pc. What else can I do? Thanks

mikel · Post by **mikel** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:35 am

Q: Are you playing a solo or multi player game ? What graphic card do you have (PCI or AGP and how much ram) ? Do you have any other programs running during gameplay (email, scheduler,...) ?

Reason could be that RAM is full and the system starts swapping after some time.

Gar Trueluck · Post by **Gar Trueluck** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:42 am

Well, I'm playing single, I've got 128 rdram, and I don't multitask while I'm running the game. I can't figure it out. The game basically worked fine on my P2 450 mhz. I wonder if it has anything to do with Win ME on my new system.

Nick_Dude · Post by **Nick_Dude** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:55 am

Holy fuck your computer is fast!!!!

Gar Trueluck · Post by **Gar Trueluck** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:58 am

Yeah, when the pos is working!

mikel · Post by **mikel** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 1:07 am

I don't think its ME, I've heard of no such problems with ME and some of my friends play it under ME, but none of them has a P4 !

The cpu-speed is only one small part. In most cases where speed goes down after some time the bottleneck is RAM and the disk.
(Defragmented disk ? what size and how many files has the drive you installed BG2 ? During gameplay a lot of files are copied to temporary cache folders, they can slow down game after some time, but usually when exploring new areas or loading/saving games)

If you don't encounter problems with other programs indicating that something is wrong with some piece of hardware on the computer, and if you have enough free space on your defragmented disk, then I've no idea than playing around with BG2 configuration settings. (There are tools even for ME to trace and analyse bottlenecks, but can be a lot of work and beyond doing it in this forum, sorry)

Perhaps someone else can throw in a hint.

Gar Trueluck · Post by **Gar Trueluck** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 1:13 am

Well, I'm wondering if its not the P4 chip. I was wary of going with a new proc so soon. But you know how sometimes ya just gotta have it. Anyway, I'm gonna do a little research, and if I can't solve the problem, I'll just have Gateway send me an Athlon! Trial and error.

mitheral · Post by **mitheral** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 4:36 pm

I have a PII 300MMX, 64 MB RAM, 8.4 GB HDD with 2.5GB free, and I ned to Defrag my pc after 2 hours of game play, or else the game slows down to a rediculous speed (8 minutes to move from one side of the monitor to the other).

To defrag: START-PROGRAMS-ACCESSORIES-SYSTEM TOOLS-DISK DEFRAGMENTER

Make sure that you turn off any auto-running programs (Screen saver, Task Scheduler, etc) before and during the Defrag, or the Defrag will stop and have to restart.

Once the defrag is running, do the shopping, goto bed, as it will take a long time. It took my PC 8 hrs to finish it's first defrag (I hadn't defraged for over 6 months), and if you have a huge HDD, it could take longer.

Hope this works

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flinfman · Post by **flinfman** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 4:44 pm

I agree with the scandisk/defrag option. Try that first. I'm running an Athlon 750 with 256 RAM and I think Intel's RDRAM is overrated personally, but that's me. But more RAM may help for sure. Have you got plenty of memory left on your harddrive? You always want to leave at least a good 100MB cushion there.

junioramus · Post by **junioramus** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 5:23 pm

Just another tidbit here- I'd crank the size of the cache up to a gig, if you've got the room. Change it in the BGII Config.

Also, do you have the graphics all maxed out? your vid card may be having a little trouble keeping up. When things get hectic on-screen(multiple spells at once, multiple deaths at once) the frame rate is gonna dive no matter what rig you're running. Especially in 8X6 resolution.

Hope that helps.

Junioramus

mikel · Post by **mikel** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 5:29 pm

I don't know if this is theoretical, because a brand new P4-PC should have plenty space on hard disk.

But perhaps it gives some configuration advice if you really get a new PC or redo system installation:
I would suggest much more than 100 meg free as limit. Free disk space should be 10% of the capacity (min 100mb even on small partitions), otherwise Win is getting *really* slow when writing data to disk. It's also getting slow when a lot of files are on the disk ( a lot : several thousand ). The defrag does not help in this case, the access through the FAT (File allocation table) takes the time (Win reads a lot of entries to find the start of the file or the next free cluster on the hard disk where it can start writing).

Perhaps a small advice for the future : partition large disks (create 2 or 3 drives ), for example create a c drive for the system and 'normal' programs, a d drive for games and a smaller e drive for files which are temporary or changes very often(internet cache, email-folder etc). This avoid defragmentation on program or system directories. Since there are also less files then on one drive this also helps a bit to reduce the overhead in scanning through a large FAT to find a file or a free cluster on the disk.

About graphic: If the problem starts after 20-30 min game time then I don't believe in problems with graphic configuration, they would appear immediatly. But I admit I have also no real solution.

[This message has been edited by mikel (edited 12-27-2000).]

Gar Trueluck · Post by **Gar Trueluck** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 7:05 pm

Well, after much research and reconfiguring, I believe I have more or less solved my problem. There was a memory hogging app running constantly in the background as well as some ghost devices in my device manager (discovered in safe mode). I believe my rig is primed for some serious hours of gameplay now. I've got HDD space in abundance. Would it really be ok to crank the cache size up to aroung 1000 mb? More the better?

mikel · Post by **mikel** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 7:42 pm

If you did a full install: No need for big cache, it's already on your disk.
Even with standard installation no need for such big cache, 1 gig would hold nearly all areas from the game. I doubt that you ever play without interruption that long.

Ron · Post by **Ron** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 9:43 pm

Maybe not BUT if one day he chose to do so he could

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