AoC Computer Help/ Frustrated

Okay I have been thinking lately and last night really bothered me. I have spent a lot of money to play AoC and I am not happy with the performance

I just hate the fact that I am running a:
Q6600
2 x 8800GT's
4gig of memory(I see 3.5 of this)
and vista 32bit

And in Tortage I was getting only 35FPS, and now in the next city after Tortage I am not breaking 15FPS and I am running medium setting. Any other game I blow out of the water, but this game seems to be poorly optimized. I don't know what kind of a rig you actually need to run this but its really irritating me big time(I spent almost 1200 in upgrades). I should be running this game smooth and I am not at all. I have vista 64bit coming to me on Tuesday, we will see if that helps.

Anyone have any suggestions? Cause this is deff. frustrating


Lorahand

Try a lower res? Hell, I get 35ish FPS in a lot of places and the game runs just fine at that FPS. I don't get lag...and i'm unwilling to lower any settings for extra FPS that I don't currently need. The # doesn't mean much so long as you aren't lagging...

~Sun

Yeah but any other resolution on the 22in widescreen looks like crap to be honest.... and honestly dual 8800gt's should not have a problem at all pushing the highest res on those screens.

I guess its irritating cause I have to lower setting/resolution to run the game.... I don't need to play it on high, but I would at least think I could run medium at the settings it defaults to.

deff something going on, 4 gig ram, 640 8800 gts oc edition, dual core e6750, vista 64.

my rig is on high and some decent wide screne resolution, also in what passes for dx10

Ive seen low framrates that you describe but if i just play i rarely ever notice them but anytime i hover my mouse i'm between 20 and 30 but with no stutters or tears this is hardly a problem, i might see a stutter vary rarely but as soon as it loads whatever its loading (maby half a second) i'm good to go.

as stated above somewhere, try to play and have fun and forget the numbers, if its not fun then move on to something that is and come back later after a few patches, but if your not playing you'll never know when they "fix" whatever is buggin your rig.

also i know you posted here for a reason but when i return if someone hasnt already moved it, this probably still belongs in the tech section and i'll move it there after sufficient views.

See that makes no sense to me..

I am running:

Quad Core
(2) 8800 GTX
(4) 4gig Ram
Vista 32

At 1900x1200 on High Settings with on Average of 40-45 FPS in most zones and 30 in town.

Which drivers are you running?
Have you made updates to chip sets and bios..?
How much of that Ram is availble before you launch the game?

Something isn't right for sure somewhere. I run a Q6600 @ 3.2ghz, 4gig ram, 3870x2, 1900 x 1200 rez on high, on xp pro 32bit and I never drop below 35fps. I'm usually in the 50-60 range. Way more in an instance.

The one thing I will say though is I usually disable shadows and bloom in every game I play. They just bug my eyes or something. I recommend you try that as it seems to help many people alot. The game still looks amazing without them.

I am in the same boat od Lorddrow, only I have 1 8800 GTX. I am running on high everything, excpet bloom and shadows. Check a few things on your system. I would run a virus and spyware scan. Honestly check your internet connection, make sure you are not dropping packets. I know a friend of mine was have low frame rate in WoW, and that ended up being the issue.

Which drivers are you running?
Have you made updates to chip sets and bios..?
How much of that Ram is availble before you launch the game?

I am running the current Nvidia drivers and also useing the latest chipset drivers for my EVGA 780i SLI board. How do I check the version of the bios? I always forget how to do this, although on my old mobo I did upgrade bios and I saw an FPS increase. As far as ram available before I play the game, I guess I have never checked, but nothing starts up at boot up that is not a microsoft process.

I would run a virus and spyware scan. Honestly check your internet connection, make sure you are not dropping packets. I know a friend of mine was have low frame rate in WoW, and that ended up being the issue.

I just reformatted and finished yesterday, and have done a scan and nothing is on my system. I also know for a fact that I am not having a bad internet connection, I actually had them come out and test it for me about a week ago.


I am thinking maybe I might have a bad vid card... I am going to try removing one and playing the game and see how it runs, if its fine, then I will remove the other one and see how it runs with that one. Do a compare of the two cards and maybe its a possibility that one is bad or not working like it should.

I will check the mem available before game when I get home from work in a few hours, and also the bios version and see what issues the newest versions offer, may offer better compatability for the 8800 series cards.

well that is good info there. That is also a great idea.

You should be able to check your BIOS version in the BIOS setup, or on one of the first screens.

You should have no issues. My rig in sig runs this game tits but my native resolution is only 1280x1024. I play 2xAA, 16xAF, all options enabled, HIGH quality settings. I get around 35fps in city and I'm in the 55-66 range every where else. This is on a dual core @ 3.2GHz, 4GB of memory and a single 8800GT @ stock clocks. (does this game make use of dual GPU's? I didn't think it did.)

Also does the game support quad core yet?

One thing you should keep in mind: The 8800GT 512mb card is not a great card at high resolutions. Not at all. It just doesn't have the memory bandwidth. I think it runs on a 256 bit memory bus compared to the 8800GTX's 384 bit memory bus. That makes a HUGE difference when running high resolutions and when using AA as well. Where as the 8800GT 512 and 8800GTS 512 start to choke the 8800GTX and Ultra pull ahead.

Also the reason your Vista install does not show all of your memory is due to the fact that you upgraded Vista 32 on top of windows XP 32 bit...correct? Do a clean FRESH install of vista 32 and it will show all 4GB of your memory. If you only have a upgrade version of vista then you need to format the drive, create a partition and install XP on one partition then load up vista while in XP and install vista to the OTHER partition. Once in vista you can format the partition with XP on it and use that space as storage.

The Memory issue is due to it being 32 bit. That is all he is going to see.

Vista 32 SP1 shows all 4gig. Mine does at least.
Thats the other thing.. Vista 32 SP1?

Quad Cores are not being fully utilized at this time, but it does not hurt to have them either.
SLI is not supported either, so I do not use Frame Redirect or Split Frame setup.

Bios can be checked in the bios, but you should be able to get a tool (I can't remember which one that tells you bios version)
Latest supported Nvidia ? or Latest Beta? I am running 174.74 beta.

Do you have a Vista Theme running? I set mine to a windows classic and got back almost 300MB of mem.

Disable Anti-Virus checkin when you run AoC.. I use Norton so I disable Auto Protect and it save me a couple of megs in mem.

Latest supported Nvidia ? or Latest Beta? I am running 174.74 beta.

Just to let you know there is a final version now of 175.16 out there.....

Vista 32 SP1 shows all 4gig. Mine does at least.
Thats the other thing.. Vista 32 SP1?

yep mine is now since I updated when i got home, thanks for the advice

Do you have a Vista Theme running? I set mine to a windows classic and got back almost 300MB of mem.

I am going to give this a shot, just went back to the classic view.

SLI is not supported either, so I do not use Frame Redirect or Split Frame setup.

Where is this at?

Also I think I am going to disable SLI and see what happens...

Jephthah wrote:The Memory issue is due to it being 32 bit. That is all he is going to see.

You are incorrect sir. Vista 32 bit supports and sees 4GB. Yours might not due to the reason I already gave or because it is not fully updated. There was an issue with vista 32 bit when it first released not revealing all 4GB of memory when that amount is used but Microsoft fixed that issue.

Yeah I deff see 4gb now