Why can't my computer handle WW?

[blargue]

Hey guys. Great game. The only problem is that my computer doesn't seem to be able to run it at all. I have a Gforce 4 video card. I'm running XP. I have a P4 2.66. And I have 256 MBs of Ram. In other words, nothing special but well above and beyond what I should need to run it smoothly.

I run WW on the second lowest resolution it has available. I'm not running anything else at the same time. It's loading about a frame every 2 seconds.

Any ideas?

[Zogu]

Hmmm if you're running an anti-virus and/or a firewall, try to carefully turn them off for a few minutes. Then try running WW. Don't forget to turn your protections back on afterwards! Some crappy firewall programs are CPU hogs.

Otherwise, try to find out if there are some "hidden" programs or drivers eating up a lot of CPU. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and check the CPU usage, sort it by process. Anything special running in the background... an indexing process, a MP3 downloader, an unknown process, ...?

Run dxdiag and check your video drivers' compatibility; please provide your current DirectX version.

[Flashfire]

Just had the same problem with my computer at work. Fixed it by going into DXDIAG and ENABLING Direct3D and DirectDraw in the display tab. Give it a shot.

[blargue]

Argh! I tried those suggestions and nothing seems to help here. I checked the processes running (ctl + alt + del) and nothing peculiar showing there either. I tried updating DirectX to the newest version available too. No dice.

Any other ideas?

Thanks for your help by the way.

[Fingers]

GF4 should be enough to run the game, so it's some kind of a configuration issue. ZoneAlarm is known to have memory problems (on my laptop its memory usage slowly creeps up until it uses 2GB of memory...) but this sounds too drastic.

Do you have recent drivers for your video card? Is your desktop set to 32-bit color? Have you tried running with the -nosound command line option? Have you tried both windowed and fullscreen modes?

[Strider]

You might try turning off System Restore, also.
Start | Settings | Control Panel | System
Put a check on turning off System Restore.

[blargue]

Alas, it's not looking like it's meant to be.

[Shadowcat]

If upgrading your video drivers doesn't help, you could try downgrading them. Unfortunately the standard advice to ensure you have the latest drivers simply doesn't always hold true with nVidia, as they have a single driver to cover all their video cards, and newer releases almost always just focus on newer hardware, sometimes to the detriment of older hardware.

I also have a GeForce 4 (Ti4200), and the last good video drivers for my card under Win98 (which I run) was 56.64. Newer drivers invariably make my machine quite unstable.

A quick look at the nVidia forums suggests:
"43.03 was the most stable driver of its era." (link (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-56760.html))
"66.93 WHQL drivers ... or even the good old 56.72 WHQL drivers" (link (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-43491.html))

The latter being in connection with a GF4MX rathger than a GF4, but I suspect the 56.72s are the XP equivalent of my 56.64s so they are probably worth a shot.

[Brainiac4]

256MB of RAM is way low for running WindowsXP. Do you get reasonable performance in other games?

[senon]

has anyone found any new ideas on this problem? my computer is running with WinXP SP2, the latest drivers and a full gig of ram, but for some reason i'm falling below 10 fps even at low resolutions.

i've tried kill every other process, i've tried windowed mode vs. fullscreen. in every case, the framerate slows to a crawl the moment the shrapnel logo first pops up.

i've tried installing on a friend's much-lower-spec'ed laptop, and it worked fine with no framerate problems even with half the RAM and several other applications running in the background.

any ideas?

-senon

Athlon64 3000+
1.00 GB RAM
Radeon 9600xt

[PvK]

Sounds to me like your video card isn't working well with the OpenGL code that WW uses.

PvK

[senon]

hmm... i'll try it with somehting else that uses openGL and see how that goes. thanks.

-senon

[PvK]

(BTW I actually had the reverse issue on one of my computers - its GeForce4 4000 won't work with Direct3D in DirectX 9.0c at all, but it plays Wierd Worlds great since it has no problem with OpenGL.)

[Shadowcat]

PvK: Weird. I have a GF4Ti4200 and have no trouble with D3D and DX9.0c. I use the 56.64 drivers under Win98 (the later drivers are directed at their newer hardware, and only cause problems for the GF4 series in my experience). Which drivers do you use??

[Combat Wombat]

Shadowcat said:
PvK: Weird. I have a GF4Ti4200 and have no trouble with D3D and DX9.0c. I use the 56.64 drivers under Win98 (the later drivers are directed at their newer hardware, and only cause problems for the GF4 series in my experience). Which drivers do you use??



Thats because the Ti4200 was the only card in the Geforce 4 series that wasn't craptacular

[TaoLibra]

senon said:
has anyone found any new ideas on this problem? my computer is running with WinXP SP2, the latest drivers and a full gig of ram, but for some reason i'm falling below 10 fps even at low resolutions.



Just out of curiosity, how do you know the FPS? Is there a way of telling Weird Worlds to display that information?

[Combat Wombat]

FRAPS
http://www.fraps.com/

[TaoLibra]

Very cool -- thanks for the link, Combat Wombat.

[PvK]

Combat Wombat said:

Shadowcat said:
PvK: Weird. I have a GF4Ti4200 and have no trouble with D3D and DX9.0c. I use the 56.64 drivers under Win98 (the later drivers are directed at their newer hardware, and only cause problems for the GF4 series in my experience). Which drivers do you use??



Thats because the Ti4200 was the only card in the Geforce 4 series that wasn't craptacular



Apparently so. I have a "NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000" in this machine. Driver Version: 6.14.0010.8198 (English) on Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (5.2, Build 3790) Service Pack 1 (3790.srv03_sp1_rtm.050324-1447).

At home I use Win98SE and have no probs with that GeForce card on DirectX 9, unless it's a Microsoft game programmed to refuse to install on Win98 (e.g. Fable: The Lost Chapters, which I haven't been able to get to run on 5 different computers).

PvK

[blargue]

Okay, I should preface this post with an apology- I simply forgot to post a reply here. This post is now well past ancient.

The correct response to this problem is... drumroll... SHADOWCAT! There seems to be a problem with the most current drivers and GeForce 4 cards running WW. Downgrading works perfectly. Thanks for the help.

Blargue

[Finnius]

i have the same problem..specs are as follows:

Time of this report: 12/11/2006, 11:15:13
Machine name: DESKTOP
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Ultimate (6.0, Build 6000) (6000.vista_rtm.061101-2205)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: INTELR
System Model: AWRDACPI
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz (2 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 1022MB RAM
Page File: 584MB used, 1717MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 6.00.6000.16386 32bit Unicode

------------
DxDiag Notes
------------
Display Tab 1: No problems found.
Sound Tab 1: No problems found.
Input Tab: No problems found.

--------------------
DirectX Debug Levels
--------------------
Direct3D: 0/4 (retail)
DirectDraw: 0/4 (retail)
DirectInput: 0/5 (retail)
DirectMusic: 0/5 (retail)
DirectPlay: 0/9 (retail)
DirectSound: 0/5 (retail)
DirectShow: 0/6 (retail)

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
Card name: RADEON 9600 Series (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM)
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type:
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4152&SUBSYS_00021002&REV_00
Display Memory: 255 MB
Dedicated Memory: 127 MB
Shared Memory: 127 MB
Current Mode: 1024 x 768 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: Generic Non-PnP Monitor
Driver Name: atiumdag.dll,atiumdva.dll,atitmmxx.dll
Driver Version: 7.14.0010.0443 (English)
DDI Version: 9Ex
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
Driver Date/Size: 11/2/2006 04:46:02, 2413568 bytes

don't know if you really need any more info than that..but i get the same stutter as reported above...it's pretty bad, makes the game very un=fun to play...and i really would like to enjoy this game...

any help would be appreciated...

thank you in advance

Finnius

[Fingers]

The Radeon 9600 should be good enough as such, in fact the machine I used when programming the game had one of those cards.

Are you playing the game in a window or fullscreen? Are you using Vista's 3D accelerated interface? I don't have any first hand experience with Vista but I know it's pretty demanding on the video card. When running in a window it'll have to render both the OS and the game using the 3D card, and the 9600 may not be up to the task.

You could also try launching the game with the -verbose command line option and see what it reports about your video driver.

[Finnius]

tried in both full and windowed...window was a bit better
tried running in compatability mode (xp, win200) no change

also went and shut down almost all processes except those needed to keep computer going, (had like 3% cpu usage), loaded WW then had a full 54% cpu usage..still no change

you would think that, although my machine isnt the biggest and baddest thing out this week..it should hold its own (until the new Win64 games start showing up in a few months..lol)

i can run tiger woods 07, and marvel ultimate alliance, but cant seem to get this little 33Meg to run properly..lol...i just realized, WW takes up more cpu % then its actual size !

ah well...guess i will have to get a new card or wait a bit to see what happens when Vista gets officially released and you guys test it on that OS...

[Fingers]

If this is the demo or any version prior to 1.2 then the 50% CPU usage on a dual processor system is normal. The game simply uses up as much CPU as the operating system will allow, like most games do...

I strongly suspect that you're either somehow running the game with Microsoft's OpenGL implementation instead of the correct ATI driver, or the 3D accelerated user interface in Vista is using up your GPU power (if you're using that). Your hardware itself is slightly higher-spec than what the game was developed on so that's not the problem.

Personally, I'm not going to get a Vista system any time soon. Maybe after a couple of service packs it'll become usable.

[Fingers]

I've done a bit of research on the subject and as it turns out ATI basically hasn't released fully functional drivers for Vista yet. Among other things OpenGL is not supported at all by the current (beta) version of ATI Catalyst Vista, and Microsoft's own OpenGL implementation doesn't work as advertised (it doesn't use 3D acceleration at all). Some if not all NVidia cards are similarly affected. Ironically, integrated graphics chips from Intel apparently have fully working drivers already.

I would not recommend getting a Vista machine at this point if you're interested in gaming. Besides most independent games, OpenGL is necessary to run games based on Quake3 or Doom3 engines and many others; typically, whenever a game is released on both PC and Mac it uses OpenGL because the standard exists on both platforms.