Battlefield Vietnam

[kershaw72787]

I have this game and believe I have the system to handle it, but I would appreciate if you told me. Here are my specs.

Amd Athlon 64 3300+ processor
1.5gigs RAM
ATI Radeon 128mb 9600 XT graphics card
Creative Audigy 2 ZS sound card

If the game should run fine my question then is, why isn't it? It looks great, loads fast, but doesn't play smoothly at times, usually when there is a lot of vegitation. The game clips. The first Battlefield played perfect on my system, shouldn't this one? I have also posted a thread in System Issues and would be much appreciated if you took a look at it. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Ryan Neaves

[And_so_it_goes]

your video card is probably your bottleneck, i know mine is. also, no matter how good of a system you have i think that there are many games which will always slow down in places no matter what. take morrowind and gothic 2 for example. whenever you are in a big city the framerate slows. i think it has more to do with the software programming than any hardware issues.

[E.T.]

The usual reply: Did you update video card drivers?

Somehow, I just cant see this card not performing well for you. The ATI Radeon 128mb 9600 XT is a good performer: four pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders with a 128Bit memory interface & clock speed of 500MHz [100 MHz faster than the 9600 Pro predecessor].

[Suicides-by-Steve]

The usual reply: Did you update video card drivers?

Somehow, I just cant see this card not performing well for you. The ATI Radeon 128mb 9600 XT is a good performer: four pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders with a 128Bit memory interface & clock speed of 500MHz [100 MHz faster than the 9600 Pro predecessor].

I agree. Not only should you try to find optimal video drivers, but make sure your sound drivers are up-to-date as well. If the game is as aurally intensive as the first, you need to have current sound drivers. As well, maybe try higher resolutions. I have games that play WAY smoother the higher the resolution. Without knowing the specific graphic options in-game though... it's a tough call diagnosing the problem.

[DBS]

Just a quick fyi...Battlefield Vietnam is $19.95 now at www.gogamer.com (http://www.gogamer.com) and I might pick it up. I been playing alot of CoDUO online and wonder how BV is as I have heard some good things.

[Hieremias]

your video card is probably your bottleneck, i know mine is. also, no matter how good of a system you have i think that there are many games which will always slow down in places no matter what. take morrowind and gothic 2 for example. whenever you are in a big city the framerate slows. i think it has more to do with the software programming than any hardware issues.
I have a 256mb Radeon 9600XT, and every other system spec is inferior to kershaw's. I can play every single modern game on 1024x768 at high detail settings. Please do not fall for the "you absolutely need a modern $500 card to play games" nonsense. A 9600XT is easily enough for any game on the market today, and I expect it'll be enough for the rest of 2005.

[Aku]

your video card is probably your bottleneck, i know mine is. also, no matter how good of a system you have i think that there are many games which will always slow down in places no matter what. take morrowind and gothic 2 for example. whenever you are in a big city the framerate slows. i think it has more to do with the software programming than any hardware issues.

This is true. Morrowind will choke any system in places, and you have to turn down the view distance. When I played Deadly Dozen: Pacific Theater last year, it ran smooth as glass most of the time but slowed down severely in places in two of the later missions. In one of those missions it ran perfectly smooth except for one specific place where the framerate plummeted, no matter what the settings. Probably the result of poor level design, where too many polygons are being drawn when you're facing a certain direction. Even a Thief mod can choke a modern machine if someone designs a city mission with straight streets and the buildings run on and on down your field of view. At least, that's what they caution modders against doing in the Thief forums.

[kershaw72787]

It is mostly on scenes with high vegetation, but I still thought that this game would playsmoothly. Could it be that I have too much starting up with the system? I have turned off what I know I can under MSCONFIG, but there are still a lot of names of things that I am not sure of.

[Aku]

Even if you turn off everything you can safely turn off, the list of processes running in the background still fills up about half of the Task Manager window. Anyway, that's not it. It's most likely trying to draw too many polys in certain places and it chokes your video card. DD: Pactifc Theater does the same thing. The game has huge levels with thick vegetation all over the place, but while it is mostly smooth, there are a couple of spots in a couple of mission where it chokes. Same thing with Morrowind - you can identify the exact choke points: stand in a certain spot, turn a certain direction, and watch as your framerate instantly drops from 50 to 15. Turn around and it's back to 50.

[Suicides-by-Steve]

This is true. Morrowind will choke any system in places, and you have to turn down the view distance.

I disagree... I play on a Radeon 9000 1.5 Ghz system, and the game rarely slowed down. I used the optimizer mind you, but regardless, the areas that you say brought your system to a crawl (Solshiem?), played incredibly smoothly for me.

[Aku]

Yeah, but the optimizer just turns down your setting for you in the background. I can turn settings way down manually and get much better framerates (turning off shadows makes a big difference), although I still say it runs like crap. Plus I get that annoying lag that a lot of people experience, where you're walking along and suddenly the game pause for a second, dropping from 60 fps down to 5, then back to 60 again. It's kind of irritating inside this castle mod on Solstheim, where I'm at 50 fps, turn to face a blank wall, and it drops to 10 fps. Again, it gets back to the Morrowind engine trying to process things blocked from your view. Of course, smooth is relative in Morrowind. A lot of times it can drop down to 20 fps for a few moments and you don't even notice because you're just walking along with nothing happening. Maybe ATI cards are just tuned better to play Morrowind than Nvidia cards. Maybe their drivers work better with Morrowind. I don't know.

[Mochan]

I just think some of us are better at tuning our PCs than others. Morrowind still runs like a pig on my PC and yet I've met people claiming to run it with smooth rates in Balmora and Solstheim even on far lesser systems (like Ti500 systems with 1.2Ghz processors).

[Aku]

Maybe, but I don't know how I could tune mine any better short of overclocking it. Plus, most games run great on my machine, and some run better on my machine than what others have reported. I think it comes down to hardware. Somone might be running their game on a 256 mb video card versus my 128 mb card. I have a gig of ram, but it's PC2700, Someone else might be running the game fine on a gig of PC3200. I have an ASUS motherboard, but it's almost three years old. Someone might be running the game fine but they have a newer motherboard. Then there's quality of components. Is my ram as good as other PC2700 ram? Not sure. Is my video card as fast as another one in the same class? Might be, never really benchmarked it. There are so many factors, you can't just go by a person's processor speed and how much ram they've got.

Also, for games like Morrowoind, some people are running the vanilla game and others are running it with tons of mods. I know that if I played the game with no or fewer mods loaded, the performance would be much faster.

[Suicides-by-Steve]

Also, for games like Morrowoind, some people are running the vanilla game and others are running it with tons of mods. I know that if I played the game with no or fewer mods loaded, the performance would be much faster.

Hmmm, I did tweak Morrowind in order to play it... I turned off something such as Page Loading (something like that), along with a few other tweaks. If I come across them, I'll let you know. The game ran very well for me. What you describe never happened to me once (turning towards a wall, and the game truning into a slideshow).

[Aku]

I went through the Morrowind tweak guide a long time ago, but don't remember anything about page loading. I'll have to try running it with the optimizer turned on to experiment. I think I have AI distance set pretty high too, and I should turn the shadows off. I'm only nitpicking about it now because this mod I'm playing adds an island next to Solstheim that has the trees and the snow and all that other crap that burdens the gpu.

As a side note, you know, in all the years I've been playing games on the pc I must be doing something right. I mean, I haven't had one tenth the number problems I've seen people have with this or that game. Games crashing, games not loading, games not installing, games locking up the pc. Sometimes I've almost passed on a game because of all the bad stories I've heard, but then I get it and it works. Go figure.

[Suicides-by-Steve]

I went through the Morrowind tweak guide a long time ago, but don't remember anything about page loading. I'll have to try running it with the optimizer turned on to experiment. I think I have AI distance set pretty high too, and I should turn the shadows off. I'm only nitpicking about it now because this mod I'm playing adds an island next to Solstheim that has the trees and the snow and all that other crap that burdens the gpu.

As a side note, you know, in all the years I've been playing games on the pc I must be doing something right. I mean, I haven't had one tenth the number problems I've seen people have with this or that game. Games crashing, games not loading, games not installing, games locking up the pc. Sometimes I've almost passed on a game because of all the bad stories I've heard, but then I get it and it works. Go figure.

DontThreadLoad=1 will get rid of some of the smaller loading delays in the game. You'll get longer loading delays, but they'll happen less often.

Interior Cell Buffer=64

Exterior Cell Buffer=128

With 512MB of RAM I raised these buffer values from their original settings of 10 and 32 respectively. I’ve also tried higher values, but it seems with my memory these settings work best in smoothing out fps. If you have less memory, try lower values of around 32 and 64 respectively.

These 3 options tweaked in your .INI file helped me tremendously. As well, turning down the AI to default or just below default should help.

Just a note, I wasn't the one who said you didn't know how to tweak your machine! ;)

[Aku]

Actually, I was just making a general observation. I didn't realize it came off defensive. I don't even care what people think of my tweaking ability, lol.