After many months, Pride's Framerate troubles finally end

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Other beta testers or friends of mine will know that I often complain about the performance of my video card, versus the level of the game I am trying to play. Things that my card should be able to do with ease (ESF, namely) have erratic struggling framerates, drops as massive as from solid 100fps to as low as 20. Those of you who didn't write me off as a raving lunatic would also have known that I might have often mentioned that my graphics card previously used to consistently outperform my expectations, back around the ESF 1.1 days or so. At some point, something changed, and my card started acting like a GeForce2, even during seemingly easy engines like HL1.

Today I am pleased to announce that I have at long last discovered the problem at long last. It turns out that, at one point, my Catalyst driver set changed a previously defaulted setting that was somewhat hidden. This setting is the enabling of triple buffering, found under the compatibility button at the bottom of your direct3d window in your advanced display properties.

My catalyst drivers had apparently turned this feature off at some point. I was using 4.11's, which means that was about the time frame it changed. My generic drivers always had this enabled, as did my catalyst 4.8's.

This explains at long last why only certain applications performed well on my machine; certain games force this setting, while most do not. This is why I can have 70fps in most of Doom 3, and random -75fps spikes in things like Half Life 2 or ESF.

If anyone has a card comparable to mine and has suffered similar problems, I highly recommend enabling this setting. I did other things using a tool called Rage3D as well, but I believe that the Triple Buffering was specifically the major helpful factor.

Give it a shot if you have framerate trouble, particularly in ESF. I'd like to see what results others come up with.
 
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Well I'm glad you found everything without help >: p.

To Others:
Triple Buffering is only used during vertical sync, so don't expect it to be a miracle cure if you're not using vsync. Without it, your frame rate will drop by half each time it can't sustain that number. Say your refresh rate is 75, but you only render 70, then it'll automatically drop to 37.5 to maintain a clean image, and if you can't render 37.5, then it'll do 18.75, etc, etc. Triple buffering fixes this problem by allowing it to continue rendering at any frame rate under your refresh rate while still maintaining a crisp, clean image.
 
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w00.. i got geforce 2 mx.. and it totally sux.. there is only like 1 map that i can play with 60 fps.. and thats the roshi island.. .. any other map when i swoop the fps drops to 30, or in some it just is 30 >.< well for now, im looking to buy some new RAM cards from mehh friend, it should help the problem a bit and then a new video card, worth of 400€ that i could get from him like 100-200€ and its brand new =P

so i hope ill get some munny soon enought and then i can have more fun playing esf and any other game
 
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Yes, it should be noted that it was Smith who helped me figure all this out.

You da man. 'Nuff said.
 
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Nah, I only led you in the right direction, you did the hard part ^_^.
 
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SaiyanPrideXIX said:
Other beta testers or friends of mine will know that I often complain about the performance of my video card, versus the level of the game I am trying to play. Things that my card should be able to do with ease (ESF, namely) have erratic struggling framerates, drops as massive as from solid 100fps to as low as 20. Those of you who didn't write me off as a raving lunatic would also have known that I might have often mentioned that my graphics card previously used to consistently outperform my expectations, back around the ESF 1.1 days or so. At some point, something changed, and my card started acting like a GeForce2, even during seemingly easy engines like HL1.

Today I am pleased to announce that I have at long last discovered the problem at long last. It turns out that, at one point, my Catalyst driver set changed a previously defaulted setting that was somewhat hidden. This setting is the enabling of triple buffering, found under the compatibility button at the bottom of your direct3d window in your advanced display properties.

My catalyst drivers had apparently turned this feature off at some point. I was using 4.11's, which means that was about the time frame it changed. My generic drivers always had this enabled, as did my catalyst 4.8's.

This explains at long last why only certain applications performed well on my machine; certain games force this setting, while most do not. This is why I can have 70fps in most of Doom 3, and random -75fps spikes in things like Half Life 2 or ESF.

If anyone has a card comparable to mine and has suffered similar problems, I highly recommend enabling this setting. I did other things using a tool called Rage3D as well, but I believe that the Triple Buffering was specifically the major helpful factor.

Give it a shot if you have framerate trouble, particularly in ESF. I'd like to see what results others come up with.
I had a gecube 9600xt extreme doing crap like this, and it constantly pissed me off, causing me to reformat. The card worked so dam great the first week I had it, but then something was screwing up as i noticed this must of happened after I had updated my mainboard drivers from default asus board drivers to newer nvidia chipset drivers.

At first I thought "hmm, ati and nvidia hate each other right ? must be a cross conflict between there drivers on my system". This card still managed to work well in other games too, but then Need for speed underground gave me the anger enduced screaming. In the end my brother got rid of this gfx card to a mate of his, and it worked great in his system for a simlar length of time to mine, he was using a via chipset that was only simlar to this mainboard in terms of pricing and features.

Then, one day, the fan died and we went to my supplier to return the card. From here, I don't know anything more about this gfx card's presence (I think it might still be sitting there waiting to be picked up). we picked it up once and tried it in my brother's system and crap started happening with that, the 4.9 drivers (latest at the time) were refusing to install on my brother's system for some time untill he changed a few things (before he had installed these drivers, amazingly enough, the sp2 drivers were installed on his system for the card, the default windows drivers to be exact).

Thanks for this info though, may very well come in handy. Ever since this card died iv'e been using my brother's spare, crappy fx5200 :(.
 
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Well, at time I had GeForce 6800 UE ( l8ter I used SLi to make her and her twin card linked together in SLi mode ), I accidentally installed veeery outdated nVidia drivers which almost ruined mine card on hardware base. I constantly had like 10 FPS in any thing I played, even when moving a slidebar in Win XP it was struggling and was blocking. Then I found out Omega drivers and gave them a shot. It worked pretty damn well, almost max fps in any game. But now I'm using the drivers that I got with mine motherboard, since Omega drivers doesn't support SLi yet ( maybe they do, I didn't checked the site in last few months )
 
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eeerm .. omega drivers are for ATI cards not nVidia
 
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XD, weren't the Omega drivers the experimental ones used for Doom3? I still use Catalyst...time to update.

EDIT: Where do you get them from? I can only find the Catalyst drivers I have on the ATI site, despite the fact they have drivers for Windows Vista up already.
 
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According to omegadrivers.net, they have nVidia omega drivers aswell.
 

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