MagicMerlin on 14/10/2002 at 07:49
I got 800Mhz AMD, TNT2ultra and 256MB Ram, the partition with the swapfile (WinXP) is 20 GB (!) large. For sightseeing i went to WolverineHall. Everything ok, by now. Went outside and oops. Slideshow. When i move the cursor, it took some time. Later it "stabilised and i thought have a look at Vive (i used the MageGuildTransport). The plaza is great. Very fast (for my specs). Wnet outside and ..... Moving one step forward took close to 5 min. Calling "SAVE" via "esc" about 2min. Exit the game and there was that yellow Mark saying "Not sufficient swapspace". HAHAHA. How much does that <piep> game need? I did not restrict the maximum size.
Any info welcome.
Ps: should a MSI GF4 4200 "greatly" improve my results (by now outside about 12-17 FPS)
Thx
Mike
Forsythe on 14/10/2002 at 11:12
Re: swapping, I've heard that too much can be as bad as too little; not sure if it's true though. I have had similar issues w/ good setups through, and usually traced it down to old drivers, etc. As to the GeForce4 Ti, yeah, I suspect the difference will be quite stunning to you.
MagicMerlin on 15/10/2002 at 06:49
No old drivers etc. Its a clean new setup on XP.. (perhaps THATS the explanation). First resticted to 3000 MB, than 500 and now set to "system decide". Well, seems that walking between to many places is bad. Specially WolferineHall has a big hunger for memory.
Or does the memory also depend on the amount of used plugins ? i have my own race, the real signposts, questfix, soundenhancement, archmagetower, firemoth (official), swampsound_thing (official), teleport_thing (official) ; but most of them are disabled.
@ad GF4 4200: Increase only respective to lookout, or also with framerate ? (keeping in mind, that its just a 800MHz!)
thx
Mike
Striker on 15/10/2002 at 07:40
It's the TNT2 that's the problem. They don't handle 32 bit textures all that well in my experience.
Also, I usually find that if you set both the max and min size of the virtual memory to be the same (i.e. both 500) things seem to run slightly better.
-Striker
Pestilence on 15/10/2002 at 09:06
I get 10-30fps outside depending on the weather and AI. inside fps leaps to 40-80. I run on a 1GHz Duron with 320mb RAM and a GF4 Ti4200. Altho I havent even dared to turn off mipmapping as the water looks so nice (about time they learned to make water). I have a fixed 1024mb swapfile, and all is tied loosely together with W98 :p.
I suspect switching to DDR ram would give the game another boost besides a graphic card change.
mrPither on 15/10/2002 at 22:38
Like they said, I recommend trying a fixed size swap file (i.e. minimum size is the same as maximum size), so windows doesn't have to spend resources allocating the size. Just make sure it's big enough. It should make some difference, but nothing dramatic...
Also, kill everything else you have running on the backround, so they won't reserve any memory from the game. I'm not sure what is required to keep XP running, but in WinME I only leave Explorer and Systray running when playing the game. This also should make some difference.
The fact still is, that the TNT2 is the bottleneck in your system. With 800MHz CPU you are propably a bit CPU limited, but GF4 has full T&L support to ease the CPU load for graphics, while TNT2 has none, so you can expect reasonable increase in FPS, but perhaps bigger increase in the graphics quality. With GF4 you will have the pixel/vertex shader effects of DirectX8 which means a lot more eye candy. You'll get the water surface effect similar to the one in 3DMark2001 (which, of course, you also can't see with TNT2). And, getting a GF4 will increase your Video RAM from 32mb to 64-128MB which should help.
MagicMerlin on 16/10/2002 at 07:01
Thanx for the many answers.
Will give it a try with a fixed size. Bet between abaut 700 MB schould do it.
Thought about the GF4 for more than a month, but its price is still to high here - at least for me. Just wondered if the CPU is to low to take any advantage (except nicer look). But if you think there is at least a little gain in speed as well ...
Pestilence on 16/10/2002 at 09:07
Just remembered that (
http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dId=316&dType=guide) TweakTown has a good(ish) Morrowind tweak guide. I got great help from it to lenghten the time between area loadings while wandering around the countryside. Dunno if you've seen it but if someone hasnt theres the link.
