Dr.Haggard on 3/3/2002 at 22:00
[EDIT] Please excuse the typo in the thread title! Oops[/EDIT]
I'd be interested to know what others peoples experiences have been with regard to the performance of the Arx demo on their machines (and possibly even some feedback from the devs on whether or not the engine has been optimised yet! ;) ).
My setup is currently a P4 Northwood 1.8@2.4GHz, 256mb DDR and a 64mb GeForce 2 Ultra. Everything started out fine for me, I was pretty pleased with how the game was running, even though the mouse does sometimes feel a
tiny bit laggy, but at 1024x768x32, all details max and bump-mapping on I didn't expect 100+ fps.
Unfortunately when I reached the second area of the demo ([SPOILER]approaching the 'castle'[/SPOILER]) I found things got a lot worse.
Lots of polygons, lots of detail and lots of light sources etc conspired to reduce my framerate to less than 30 in the worst places (I checked with the (
http://www.fraps.com/) Fraps utility).
OK so my graphics card isn't a GF3 and I only have 256mb of ram on this machine, but a GF2 Ultra is still a damn good card, and coupled with 2.4GHz of processing power I kind of expected to be able to play this at the maximum settings without any trouble. The thing is though, in the worst places in the demo even turning off bump mapping and dropping to 16 bit colour didn't help much! :(
I'm not complaining though, this game is wonderful and the demo shows
huge potential for the full game - this is going to be something special and it's right up my street (this is System Shock with Goblins!). However I'm interested to know what experiences others are having with their hardware, and I'd certainly like to know from Raf or anyone else if the game has yet to be optimised (please say yes ;))
Fuinelen on 3/3/2002 at 22:14
Strange. I have a 1.466 Athlon, 512 MB ram, GEForce2 MX (32MB) and didn't experience any slowdown at all.
Big Brother on 4/3/2002 at 01:31
My system: P3 500, 128megs, Geforce 1, Win98SE.
Runs fairly well in most of the areas. Perfectly playable. In the third area, in the castle, it's juts at the level where it becomes unplayable. Combat also seems to run slowly.
Dr.Haggard on 4/3/2002 at 09:22
Fuinelen, so you have a high and consistent frame rate throughout at 1024x768x32 with bump-mapping on and all details at max? So even in the big open areas with lots of architecture, characters, light sources, water, objects etc and you swing your mouse around quickly you notice no difference?! I'd be very surprised.
There's certainly nothing wrong with my system, benchmarks check out (giving me very high scores) and other games run great, but in Arx the mouse movement just gets a little bit jerky in the big open areas :(
Maybe it is that extra ram that makes the difference though. I know from experience with my other machine that going from 256 to 512 makes a noticeable difference in some things, I just couldn't afford more than 256 when I put this new machine together :grr:
Fuinelen on 4/3/2002 at 10:20
I don't have any decrease in framerate (at least none I noticed).. I also think it might be due to the amount of Ram I have.
A framerate counter would be handy to check.
Dr.Haggard on 4/3/2002 at 13:41
Try (
http://www.fraps.com) Fraps for measuring your frame rate in any D3D or OpenGL game.
I'm just about to order myself another 256mb stick of Crucial PC2100, and I'm planning on a clean reinstall of XP Pro sometime this week. Hopefully those two things will iron out the problems.
