Demo is out

Psitticine · #1 October 30th, 2003, 02:02 AM

This is weird. I have just an old GeForce 2 in my older machine, and I can get 15 fps even with the settings on the high side of neutral. I'm just using the vanilla drivers and everything too.

Could it be a sound issue? Do you get any oddities out of the audio, and have you tried benchmarking with sound turned off? (pondering)

Saber Cherry · #2 October 30th, 2003, 02:03 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
PvK, what else is on your system? I have pretty much the same setup, only with a 128MB card (its actually slower than your 64MB one though), and get around 50 FPS in the benchmark.

What's the benchmark command?

PvK · #3 October 30th, 2003, 04:47 AM

Psitticine, yep I tried turning off the sound and it didn't affect the benchmark speed.

Saber Cherry, benchmark is a button available from the Options/Graphics/Battle Detail menu - press it and wait a few seconds for the FPS measurement to appear.

Phoenix-D, my system has a Sound BLaster Live Value sound card, a joystick, a printer/scanner, and a network card. Laser mouse. 256MB DDR system RAM. 1637 MB page file, mostly not used. I shut down practically every process besides the game before running. Windows reports 92-94% resources free. Runs practically all graphics pig games quite well. The machine isn't busy doing anything else - it's just taking forever to render these graphics, as if it is using a lame driver and/or not using 3D acceleration properly, or something. I notice too that the graphics of the magic swords and spears are "wiggly" - off every six pixels or so - does it look that way on your system?

PvK

[ October 30, 2003, 02:48: Message edited by: PvK ]

LordArioch · #4 October 30th, 2003, 05:35 AM

I'm not having as much trouble but I still wonder why my radeon 9600 pro runs normal battle detail at 14fps. This number doesnt change with changes in filtering or resolution strangely enough...but I can run Unreal Tournement 2003 at 45 fps max settings so I'd surely hope I could get a little more from dominions 2, seeing as how other people are getting 50 fps.
Low detail gives 25 fps and to get 50 i need very low detail.
I've got newest drivers and all that so it eludes me what the problem is. I blame opengl.

Saber Cherry · #5 October 30th, 2003, 05:57 AM

I got 33 in normal, 50 in lowest, and 15 in highest. I'm running high quality now at 25. Do the battles take longer at lower framerates, or do they take the same time but play more choppily?

Phoenix-D · #6 October 30th, 2003, 06:15 AM

"Phoenix-D, my system has a Sound BLaster Live Value sound card, a joystick, a printer/scanner, and a network card."

About the same as mine, except my stick isn't plugged in.

"Laser mouse. 256MB DDR system RAM. 1637 MB page file, mostly not used."

Close enough.

"I shut down practically every process besides the game before running. Windows reports 92-94% resources free. Runs practically all graphics pig games quite well."

Ditto..

"The machine isn't busy doing anything else - it's just taking forever to render these graphics, as if it is using a lame driver and/or not using 3D acceleration properly, or something. I notice too that the graphics of the magic swords and spears are "wiggly" - off every six pixels or so - does it look that way on your system?""

No, it doesn't seem to. Hmm..I assume you're using the latest drivers. Other than that, I'm stumped.

HJ · #7 October 30th, 2003, 07:41 AM

Hmm, I'm running old Radeon 7200 64MB on Athlon 800 with 256 RAM, maxed filter and normal detail, and the battles run at 14-15 fps - pretty decent. Don't Nvidia drivers have something to balance out the OpenGL performance, like choose between picture quality and performance? Maybe you can tone down something like that? Is there a way to adjust the hardware acceleration through software for Nvidia cards? Maybe this is toned down?

Quote:

Do the battles take longer at lower framerates, or do they take the same time but play more choppily?

On low framerates (such as 4-5) they become choppy, but the difference between 14 and 30 is only in speed - arrows fly longer, e.g. but everything is still smooth.

Btw, filter affects the look of the unit sprites, while the detail level refers only to the background viewing distance, as far as I was able to tell. Is this true? If it is, than I don't mind running lower detail, since the units will still look their best with maxed filter.