Pipe_Mutant on 15/1/2007 at 14:15
Hi,
Like many others I have the issue that SS2 is playing way to fast (around 350fps at ramsey station). Enabling vsynch solves slows the framerate down, but I absolutely hate vsynch in first-person-games because it causes a slight but noticable lag every time i move my mouse or move around the level.
So i tried the video-overlay-trick to slow down the framerate. I opened several video players like windows media play, zoomplay, vlc but it didn't do it.
I even tried running them all at once (and i even played a DVD too) but it didn't work. Also I tried various direct3D options and hardware-acceleration settings but no go.
As much as I love to play SS2 again one more time before Bioshock comes out, I couldn't enjoy it because of the vsynch-lag-issue. Can someone please explain step by step what I need to do to slow down SS2 with the video trick?
Thanks in advance and sorry for my english, I'm not a native speaker.
PS: That's my system
Athlon 3000+ 64
Windows xp sp2 (not the 64bit version)
2 GB RAM
GeForce 6600GT
Latest DirectX & Graca Drivers
David on 15/1/2007 at 15:46
Try applying lots of Anisotropic Filtering and Full Screen Anti-Aliasing via the NVidia Control Panel. This will dramatically cut your frame rate and also make the game look better as any jaggies will be smoothed out. :)
If you have not already done so, you can increase the resolution beyond the 1024x768 listed in the menu. Simply open the file cam.cfg in the System Shock 2 directory and change the line game_screen_size 1024 768 to either game_screen_size 1280 1024 or game_screen_size 1600 1200
Displacer on 15/1/2007 at 17:30
Ahhh but there may be a better way. This works in ShockEd, but I don't know if it does in the regular game. Put this line in your config file:
force_frame_time <framerate>
where framerate is the desired speed (I think) such as:
force_frame_time 30
I believe would set the framerate to 30, but I'm not sure about the timings. If its set to 5, everything moves in slow motion so you may need to play with the value a bit.
Let me know if it works in the regular game
There are 2 other settings I haven't checked out yet, they are:
max_frame_time
min_frame_time
Bjossi on 15/1/2007 at 20:08
That might be a range of acceptable framerate. Such as the engine changes some settings to keep the framerate between the min and max.
Pipe_Mutant on 17/1/2007 at 14:36
Thanks for the help so far!
@David: I've tried several settings of FSAA, Anisotropic Filtering and found out that at 4xFSAA and 4xAnisotropic Filtering the framerate caps at about 90 fps and the game runs at normal speed. The performance is very good (no lags whatsover) but at 1280*1024 the screen text on the HUD is so small that it's hard to read for me :rolleyes:
@Displacer: I've insertet the "force_frame_time xx" line in all .cfg files i found in my ss2 directory but didn't notice any difference ... what config file exactly did you mean?
Bjossi on 17/1/2007 at 15:09
User.cfg would be enough I think, it'd be best to try very low numbers so the change is obviously there (or not).
David on 17/1/2007 at 15:22
It probably won't work in the full game. The level editor has a lot of commands that the game does not.
Displacer on 17/1/2007 at 16:12
Right you are, I scanned the game code and it is not included. Sorry about the misinformation...