Game running choppy

restless · Post by **restless** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 8:27 am

I just bought this game, and while it runs "OK" it's choppy at times and the sound seems to stutter, especially in the battles, in some situations when i exit a building and lots of enemies are waiting for me, it's so choppy that i'm down to 50% before i can even move :|

Any tips on how I can improve performance? I really dont have trouble with any other games such as Half Life 2 which runs flawlessly. I'm on a P4 2,66ghz 512ram Radeon9700 machine, Bloodlines is running at 800x600x32, and my desktop is 1024x768x32, but i did try to change that to 800x600x32 as well, but that just made it even worse. I've turned off shadows, environmental effects and set everything else on minimum, and it doesnt seem to make a difference.

Anything I can do?

davyd7 · Post by **davyd7** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 11:26 am

My System is 2.8 Barton, 1 gig of ram [PC333 ], Nforce 2 mobo and G/force 6800 gt with 256 mb of mem, game runs like a dog!! hehe
Mem leaks is biggest prob, I dont know what these guys have done with the HF/2 engine but its def a balls up, how ever its still a great game and there is a few things you can try to improve the performance!
I actualy removed a fair few of the sound files for background music and some of the stuff that kicks in when your in a big fight, it takes a bit of experimentation, to get it right tho, but it does increase performance quite a bit!
Apart from that its best to save often [not a bad thing to do anyway] and reboot your pc,

I still run with the detail up full and the res at 1280 x 1024 tho!

matthew13 · Post by **matthew13** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 10:04 pm

I've had the same problems, and these problems tend to get worse the longer you play (i.e. after two to three hours I have to reboot since things can get really bad in areas with long view distances). As has already been mentioned memory leaks can be a problem. Also, all textures, sounds, etc. are packed into compressed files and have to be unpacked by your computer. I have read that this can account for some of the stuttering. Two things that helped my performance were first, making sure that your virtual memory settings are set to "let the computer choose" (that's not the exact wording, but you get the picture), and upgrading from 512 RAM to 1024 RAM. Also make sure you have the patch installed if you haven't already done so.

Basically, this is a programming issue, not a computer issue. This is one of the (few) disappointments with Bloodlines, especially for those who have played Half Life 2 and witnessed the high FPS, stability, and incredible detail that the Valve Source engine is capable of. I think that Bloodlines is worth putting up with this sort of annoyance, but it is a fact of life.

restless · Post by **restless** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 12:38 am

"making sure that your virtual memory settings are set to "let the computer choose"

I noticed this was mentioned in the install, but I am not sure where I do that :|

davyd7 · Post by **davyd7** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 1:24 am

I assume your running win XP !

Start- control panel- system-performance

Then look for virtual mem, iys usualy allready set to this tho, unless you altered it!!

Gorax · Post by **Gorax** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 5:15 am

I have that problem too.

I'm having this problem too. The zombie areas are damn near impossible to complete when you're playing at one frame a second. It slows right down whenever I walk around in the Hollywood area too because there's so many people. It mostly happens when there's a lot of other characters on the screen.

System specs:

P4, 1.5ghz
768 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 (256MB)
110MB hard drive with a lot of extra space.
...I think those are all the important specs anyway

I'm running Windows 2000 pro. I looked for the "Let Windows handle my swap file" option but haven't been able to find it. What should I manually set it to? (It's at 1400-2304 right now--just changed it. Will try the game again later.)

I have patch 1.2 installed too, and I'm pretty sure my video card is up to date with drivers. I play with most of the minimal game settings (except audio... I'll try turning that down a bit next time I play.)

LaCroix · Post by **LaCroix** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 10:38 am

When I first tryed playing the game, It wouldnt even load!

However, when I changed the Virtual memory to its fullest ( not let the comp choose) it ran ALMOST-perfectly!

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 5:01 pm

This has been mentioned elsewhere, but I found the best fix was to go into my video card settings and set everything for "Maximum Performance". That helped a great deal - especially, I could fight hordes of zombies in relative safety.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 5:07 pm

[QUOTE=Gorax]System specs:

P4, 1.5ghz
768 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 (256MB)
110MB hard drive with a lot of extra space.
[/QUOTE]
I assume you mean you have 110Mb of free space, in which case if you have 768Mb of RAM you are perilously close to the cliff. With that much RAM you should have at least 1.5 GB of free space at all times. If you mean that you have a 110 GB drive with lots of free space, then no problem.

Gorax · Post by **Gorax** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 9:56 pm

Eeerr, ****. I meant 110 GBs, not MBs... Oops?

But yeah, there's about 93 gigs of free space left.

Faust · Post by **Faust** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 10:27 pm

I'm not sure why it's running so slowly for you. You should be able to run it at least moderately well with your specs. More RAM would help, but I just had 768 as well, and it ran moderately well. Obviously, playing with the games graphic settings is a must - if you've not done that yet.

I'd encourage you to take a look at the PlanetVampire tech support forum. It can be found here . I noticed quite a few threads addressing slow frame rates on it.

Lucita · Post by **Lucita** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 12:15 pm

[QUOTE=restless]I just bought this game, and while it runs "OK" it's choppy at times and the sound seems to stutter, especially in the battles, in some situations when i exit a building and lots of enemies are waiting for me, it's so choppy that i'm down to 50% before i can even move :|

Any tips on how I can improve performance? I really dont have trouble with any other games such as Half Life 2 which runs flawlessly. I'm on a P4 2,66ghz 512ram Radeon9700 machine, Bloodlines is running at 800x600x32, and my desktop is 1024x768x32, but i did try to change that to 800x600x32 as well, but that just made it even worse. I've turned off shadows, environmental effects and set everything else on minimum, and it doesnt seem to make a difference.

Anything I can do?[/QUOTE]

I had nearlly the same specs too ( save a bit more RAM, 768MB ) until recently and it worked fine. Sure the memory leaks are nasty after 2 hours of play or so, so just save the game and let your machine cool down a bit until restarting the game.
You can try some things though: defrag your HD if needed, optimize your registry with a system works software ( can increase your system speed alot ), increase your virtual memory and try to stop a few background programs ( Instant Messengers, Virus Scan, and so on ) while playing.