Game slow-downs. Is it curable?

The game extremely slows down at some locations -- especially, Tarant and Caladon. What can be done about this?

I have Celeron 300mhz CPU, ASUS v3800 deluxe display adapter (nVIDIA TNT-2 chipset) with 32 mb memory, and 256 mb RAM.



Name: Elrond | Race: Elf | Gender: Male | Scheme: Warrior Mage Good | Background: Lady's man

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Elrond on 2001-09-17 16:17 ]</font>

 

I have a thunderbird 1400 266, geforce3 xx player, 256 ddr ram. and it loads a little sometimes but it's not somethings to losse your head over it loads around 5-7 secs
amybe it's the AMOUNT of ram important?
that's the only thing possible

 

maybe it runs out of ram cache and then turns to your hdd? could be,

 

There is no HDD activity while the slow-downs which I mentioned. It's just when you get into a complex, over-inhabited location, everything starts moving slowly -- characters, mouse cursor, map scrolling -- everything. As soon as you go out to "countryside", the game returns to its normal speed.

Generally, I understand, that complex graphics with multitude of NPC's cannot be loaded just as fast as simple, uninhabited locations, but after they are already loaded (and the loading takes sometimes quite a long time), why should it run slow? Then, if I may ask, what the heck has been loaded? When the game is freezing while loading another location, I understand that. But AFTER the loading, when HDD got silent, when all the caching has been complete, WHY do the characters have to move like in a slow-motion movie replay? I have a magically inclined character, and he cannot use the Tarantian Subway system, so it's a real pain in the ass crawling around this huge city, especially if you have a bunch of followers.

I just need to know, if I have a faster machine, will it help or not? Or is it just incurable? That's it.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Elrond on 2001-09-17 02:48 ]</font>

 

The minimum processor spec for the game is a Pentium 2-300, a celeron 300MHz is riding below that.



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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Saint_Proverbius on 2001-09-17 05:24 ]</font>

 

hmm

never had the system lag.. like jixx said... it lags for 5-10 or so secs every once in a while, even on my 1.3 thunderbird, 256ddram 64mb radeon w/ 88% system resources free and a 7200rpm harddrive.. i think its just the game.. whatever its not a big deal., your prob is that like friend said... celeron is like a cheap pentium, same speed (technicallY) for less money.. cause basically, even thou it clocks at 300, it doesn't run at 300 , soorry i guess you gotta get a new comp (yeah.. cause that will make you upset.. hehe).

peace
jamie

 

So, as I understand, those who have faster machines experience no slowdown problems in certain locations? Did I get it right?

 

Jinxed,your pc rocks, but the price? 3000$?
:wink:

 

I have a P3 450 and do notice a significant slowdown in more complex scenes or when a lot of NPCs are visible, but it's only slightly annoying. But three times now I've gotten into a situation where the game freezes for a few seconds every few seconds. Even the mouse. Stop, go, stop, go, stop, go. The game becomes unplayable and I have to reload.

 

I have an Athelon running at 800, with 384 megs of ram and an 8mb vidio card. In the Dark Elf villiage and Vendergroth, things crawl...

 

Interesting. I have 128 mb of ram and a P3/550. My game doesn't usually slow down in Tarant, but in vast city map areas, like Ashbury, Roseborough and Shrouded Hills, there's lag every time I move. Caladon is just slow.

Also, city MAPS are SLOW. They load for about a minute and moving the map screen is frustrating. I sure am happy I completed the game before patching, since back then maps weren't slow. Don't know why.

 

Same here,

Duron 750, Geforce 2 32mb, 448mb pc100 and I get extreme slowdowns when I'm in shops especially in tarant and caladon. I keep thinking it may be the lighting? If I removed the lanterns and the helms of light maybe I could move faster?

 

DEFINITELY remove the lanterns and helms of light. They make at least my game infernally slow.

 

I don't believe it has anything to do with system speed, I have 4 times the required memory and 3 times the required CPU speed and I have the same problems... Areas wheere theer are a lot of roofs, lot of sprites, etc... it sometimes takes several seconds between each step. It's almost painful, it comes very close to ruining the game for me. I haven't had any problems with BG2 which has similar graphics, so I'm assuming it's just extremely poor graphics programming.

If other people can make games with similar graphics engines run smoothly, Troika can too. Bottom line. If they couldn't figure out a way to code the graphics engine more efficiently they should have hired somebody who could. This could have been an A list title but with the general bugginess and the pathetic frame rate it's not even close.

And I'm seriously doubting these peopel who have systems much slower than mine who say they don't see any system slowdown. That's possible, I suppose, but it's not the norm from what I can see. Maybe some few people happen to have systems with the exact same configuration and graphics adapter that the developers had, and get adequate performance? And for the rest of us, the game blows chunks every time we get into a complex screen? That must be it, because I can't believe Troika would make the claims for min system specs that they did if they saw how badly this product runs for most of us. I tried to climb on a ship once and lost the mouse cursor for more than a minute.

 

I thought about this, and came to conclusion, that it might be caching problems. Troika says, that most video cards with memory above 32 mb experience such slow-downs when the cache is full. They also say that this is fixed in 1.0.7.0. version. Maybe the people who claim that slow-downs are acceptable on their machines just have the cards with lesser memory? Though this all sounds ridiculous to me, to be honest.

One interesting thing. Has anybody tried to defragment the hard drive? Does it make any difference?

 

Hmm...

On a K62-500 with 128Mb RAM and an 8Mb video card, I experience some slowdown problems in cities, but apparently it's not as bad as some people with better systems than mine. Perhaps it is video caching, but if that's the problem, why would someone with a 32Mb video card have problems when I don't, assuming they patched their game?

 

I'm having slowdown problems as well. My biggest problem is that the game freezes when I casts spells. It's like it's choking on trying to render the visual effects of the spell. I have a 1.3T-bird, SB Live with a Geforce 2 running Windows XP. Mebbe I should try it on a windows98 machine and see how it does.

 

In BGII I sometimes notice lag while fighting Dragons, but that's only when I'm fighting a certain dragon that summons up invisable stalkers (between my party, my minions, him, and his minions, there's about 17 critters on the screen, and one of them is a dragon) or while fighting an improved version of a certain other dragon via a patch (ouch. that fight hurts!).

Aside from those two fights, it's generally all good.

 

It makes a big difference. I'd suspect that fragmented drives are the majority of the problems people have with slow downs.

The game will still stop to load graphics for spells every so often, but that's about it.

 

I've got a p3/650 with 512mb of ram and a geforce 2 with 32mb and I have the problem.

Only, I didn't at first. At first it was fine.. Now (level 30, just finished with tsen-ang) it's starting to happen.

I'm at work so I can't check it right now, but with everything going on in the game I suspect the save files get pretty darn large... perhaps that has something to do with it.