Help Required

diaconofrost · Post by **diaconofrost** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:20 pm

Hi there!!
I've got one serious problem playing this wonderful game.
IT'S REALLY SLOW!!!
I tried to take a look in this forum to solve the problem but i didn't find a solution for mine.
Please help me!!!
My configuration is
P4 3.2 Ghz, 1GB Ram, ati x1600 pro 512 mb, win xp. (refresh monitor 60 Mhz,
no aa, no af, res 800 x 600) but it's still slow.
I thought to have a very good configuration for vampire but... where is the problem??
THANK U
Diaconofrost

Jhereg · Post by **Jhereg** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:41 pm

diaconofrost wrote:Hi there!!
I've got one serious problem playing this wonderful game.
IT'S REALLY SLOW!!!
I tried to take a look in this forum to solve the problem but i didn't find a solution for mine.
Please help me!!!
My configuration is
P4 3.2 Ghz, 1GB Ram, ati x1600 pro 512 mb, win xp. (refresh monitor 60 Mhz,
no aa, no af, res 800 x 600) but it's still slow.
I thought to have a very good configuration for vampire but... where is the problem??
THANK U
Diaconofrost

Well, right off I can say it's not your graphics card. That's what I have and it's a real power-house. It caused one of those spin-outs where after I got it the game sped up so much I was over-correcting like crazy for the first couple of games until I got used to it.

Otherwise, you look in pretty good shape. A 3.2 with 1Gb of RAM should be more than enough to give the game full play.

So I'm thinking that the problem lies elsewhere. Two things you should check.

1) How is your free disk space? If it is very low on your C: drive, then maybe you don't have adequate room for your paging file, although with your config as little as 2 Gb of free disk space should be more than enough.

2) If it ain't hardware, then it's gotta be software. What's running on your system? The easiest way to check is to right-click on your task-bar and select the Task Manager. Go to the processes tab and click the checkbox for "Show processes for all users". Then, at the top of the process list and look for a column labelled "CPU". If it's not there, then you can go to the View menu, Select Columns, and enable it. If you click on the CPU header, it will sort according to CPU usage. Click again, and it will sort descending, with the highest usage at the top of the column. Leave it like that. Next, if you don't have a "Mem Usage" column, go to view and enable that, too. Normally, at this point, the System Idle Process should be the highest user - it just occupies the CPU when nothing else is using it.

Now, start VTMB and go into a game. If it's playing slow, use Alt-Tab to switch from VTMB to the Task Manager. Look for something hogging the CPU. That should give you the culprit. If the only thing using CPU is the System Idle Process and VTMB, then we'll have to look elsewhere. Try sorting the Mem Usage column in descending order, and see if something is soaking up all of your memory.

If you do find a CPU or memory hog, then you'll have to find a way to either kill it or nice it. Killing things can be dangerous and lead to crashes and reboots and such so make sure you've saved anything important, but if you have a fiend in your sights, try right-clicking on it and selecting End process. If nothing weird happens, then Alt-Tab back to the game and see if things have improved.

If something weird does happen, you're looking at a re-boot. Repeat all of the steps up to killing, but don't kill it. Now you're going to try to nice it. That just means ordering it to back off.

If your system is multi-cpu or hyperthreaded, you can right-click on the process and use Affinity... to tell it to use only one CPU. Otherwise you can adjust the Priority to Below Normal or Low, to order it to yield to VTMB.

Let us know if any of that helps. If not, we'll look for something else. If it does, let us know what was causing the grief, and what worked, in case anybody else has the same problem.

Jhereg · Post by **Jhereg** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 7:01 pm

Oh, and one other possibility just occurred to me. Sometimes, for various reasons, Windows (and some applications) go into a 'clean-up' cycle. Effectively, they bury themselves in the disk controller for awhile. In Task Manager under the Performance tab, typically you will see the system pushing up a little grass at the bottom of the CPU usage graphs, but everything will be slow. Starting Notepad, which should take as long as it takes to click on the icon, might take seconds or even minutes.

If this is the case, then I'm afraid that the only good solution is to wait it out. If you have SQL Server on your system, maybe stopping it will ease your pain. Maybe it's caused by a virus scanner, or an ad-ware or mal-ware scanner. In such cases, perhaps turning them off will help. As a safety precaution if you are shutting down security software, it would be a good plan to disable your network connection for the duration of the shut-down. The barbarians are always at the gates.

diaconofrost · Post by **diaconofrost** » Fri Dec 29, 2006 8:33 am

Still Slow!!!

Hi guys,
thank u so much for ur help but... It's still slow!!!
I tried to kill or nice almost everything but nothing good happened!!
I'm becoming really nervous believe me!
Sometimes VtmB seems to be fluid and after few seconds... back slow.
So... maybe i just need to upgrade my RAM memory and see. I will let u know!
Have a wonderful new year
Diaconofrost

fbandersnatch · Post by **fbandersnatch** » Mon Jan 01, 2007 6:02 am

Hey diaconofrost, I've got to say that Jhereg's issue #2 (another program bogging down your game) is the likely culprate.

I have almost an identical system to you (P4 3.2GHz, Radeon X1600) and I've just been replaying Vampire with only the issues you'd expect from this buggy but wonderful game.

(I am replaying this game but, I previously played it with a slower CPU, smaller graphics card, and at a higher resolution 1024x768x32 without much trouble.)

If your serious about tracking down the problem Start -> Run -> msconfig is a great tool for clean booting Windows XP.

f.