Display & Other Problems

[Boron]

dominion seems to need lots of resources .
i have win xp too but fortunately a quite new pc .


if i play though sp and go to the point of insane wishing / battles etc. with hordes of units i have to wait 5-10 minutes for a new turn being generated .
furthermore i have the ati graphics card problem in battles .

when i run dominions twice , e.g. for sp testing and for taking my turns in mp it gets unplayable even on my only 3/4 year old pc .



since windows xp needs more resources , mainly RaM i guess your pc is now slightly too slow .



2 ideas : first try running dominions in windows 98 compability mode .
if this doesn't help :
install windows 98 again too .
each time you want to play dominions you boot then with windows 98 and for everything else you boot with win xp .


i was not able to find anywhere the system requirements of dominions 2 .
johan or kristoffer could you please post them for edi ?


i guess mainly your RaM and your processor are a bit too slow for windows xp AND dominions 2 .

edi what kind of RAM do you have ? i guess a very slow one

[Edi]

Ah, thanks, I suspected it was something like that. Crap. Typical Windows XP.

Well, not to worry, I'll be sorted in a couple of weeks. I'm going to get myself Mandrake Linux 10 Powerpack Edition (the store was out of them, they get more in a week or two) so I'll just install that on the 10 GB of unpartitioned space I've got and install Dom2 on Linux. Having an OS capable of taking advantage of both Celeron 500 processors (I've got a double processor board and a spare Cel500) should also help.

What kind of RAM do you have?

SDRAM, 100 MHz bus speed. My system is four years old, so it tends to have problems running newer games.

Edi

[Chazar]

As I said somewhere else before: I am running Dom2 on an old 600Mhz machine with an old GeForce2MX pretty fine & fast. The problem usually lies within the bad OpenGL Drivers under windows (since windows promotes DirectX instead). Use third-party drivers. This helped me to get it finally going on my newer 2GHz/ATI machine.

[PDF]

Chazar said:
As I said somewhere else before: I am running Dom2 on an old 600Mhz machine with an old GeForce2MX pretty fine & fast. The problem usually lies within the bad OpenGL Drivers under windows (since windows promotes DirectX instead). Use third-party drivers. This helped me to get it finally going on my newer 2GHz/ATI machine.

Do you have some links to get some 3rd-party OpenGL drivers ? I'm still unhappy with a 2.4GHz rig w/Radeon 9600 having comparable perfs with Dom than my previous 500Mhz/GF2 ...

[reverend]

I usually use the Omega drivers. They are available for NVidia and ATI at www.omegadrivers.net

The refresh rate under OpenGL is a windows / driver problem and has nothing to do with Dom2 itself.

[Arryn]

reverend said:
I usually use the Omega drivers. They are available for NVidia and ATI at www.omegadrivers.net

That site has been giving me "connection refused" errors for several weeks. Has anyone else had troubles getting to it? [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Bug.gif[/img]

[archaeolept]

for refresh rate in XP that is purely microsoft "intentional stupidity". you need a 3rd party refresh rate fix. I use refresh force, but there are others.

as to radeon performance w/ Dom II, well, it is pretty funny

I don't know what the explanation is. I would expect some strange thing in the engine that Dominions used. For a long time nVidia was so dominant, a lot of devs only bothered using nvidia cards to develop on. This was, of course, actively encouraged by nvidia reps, who also pushed their own nvidia-specific OGL extensions. Its possible that this happened during the creation of the original graphics engine upon which Dom II is based .

[Johan K]

Dominions II was not developed with any special graphics card in mind and does not use any non-standard OpenGL commands. So I would blame ATI for not producing decent OpenGL drivers. But I guess they don't care much whether Dominions runs well or not .

[Edi]

archaeolept said:
for refresh rate in XP that is purely microsoft "intentional stupidity". you need a 3rd party refresh rate fix. I use refresh force, but there are others.

Are these 3rd party refresh rate fixes graphics card independent, and where can I get them?

Edi

[Chazar]

PDF said:

Do you have some links to get some 3rd-party OpenGL drivers ? I'm still unhappy with a 2.4GHz rig w/Radeon 9600 having comparable perfs with Dom than my previous 500Mhz/GF2 ...

I use the Omega-Drivers that have been pointed to by others already. Runs pretty well with ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility.