Bit Blot Forum
Aquaria => Support => Topic started by: FlashWrogan on December 15, 2009, 12:15:58 am
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My gameplay 50% of the time is perfectly fine. The other 50% it slows down and gets so choppy that it is near-impossible to play until it clears up, if it decides to. I have unchecked vsync and frame buffer effects as well as tried multiple resolutions to no avail. As far as I can tell, my computer should be well equipped to run the game (2.16 GHz Intel processor and 1GB of RAM) so I figure it has to be my video card or video card driver.
My expertise with computers ends right about when you start talking about specifics in video cards and my research into drivers led nowhere, so I am hoping someone here knows enough to direct me. Here is the info I could find on my graphics stuff (i run Mac OS X 10.4.11 btw):
Intel GMA 950:
Chipset Model: GMA 950
Type: Display
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 64 MB of shared system memory
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x27a2
Revision ID: 0x0003
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1280 x 800
Depth: 32-bit Color
Built-In: Yes
Core Image: Hardware Accelerated
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Anyone able to help?
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Bump
It would be very helpful if someone could point me in the right direction on this.
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Hey, it doesn't sound to me like it's your video card... the game wouldn't play "smooth" at all if it were. Sounds like you're running out of RAM at certain points during gameplay when it loads a lot. Not sure, but you might try checking a system profiler when it's running choppy.
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If it is something with the RAM, I can't seem to find anything specific to suggest that. On my profiler it shows two RAM slots that give the same info:
BANK 0/DIMM0:
Size: 512 MB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
The only guess that I had was that the status might change when the game started to get choppy, but nothing changed. Is there anything I can do to further test this or something I can try to fix it?
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Use the Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app) when the game starts to chop to make sure Aquaria isn't using up 100% of your RAM and/or to close memory-intensive programs (antivirus and firewall programs, etc.) Aquaria runs at just under a gigabyte of RAM on my machine (and Team Fortress 2 holds steady at half that). Alec said something about anti-aliasing increasing the minimum specs, but there's no way to disable it (not that you'd want to - close-ups would look horrible).
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So I used the activity monitor while playing the game in windowed mode. Ever since I started having issues with game performance I will usually play with Aquaria being the only thing open. Looking at the activity monitor, the only other thing listed that used up a significant amount of RAM was something called kernel_task, which I assumed was some sort of essential system program from what I saw of it.
Keep in mind that my technical knowledge of computers is relatively limited, so I am just going to explain things as I see them and hope someone can tell me something useful :).
As I was playing the monitor listed Aquarius as using up around 200mb at first and the CPU% looked reasonable, and then started to slowly increase. One thing I noticed is there was never any large amount of "free" RAM listed on the pie chart (usually around 10-15), but that as the usage increased, the section labeled "inactive" would decrease to compensate. After 10-20 minutes, when the usage of the game had hit just under 400mb and the inactive was somewhere around 200mb, the gameplay started to get choppy. The CPU usage, which had been pretty steady at a reasonable level (i think it might have been 60% or something) started yo-yoing up and down from 99% all the way down to 15%.
The only thing I can assume is the rest of the RAM left "inactive" had to be kept there for system software or something and Aquaria started needing more RAM and there wasn't any more available. My question is, is there anything I can do to smooth out my gameplay short of putting more RAM in the computer? Is the anti-aliasing thing something that would be possible at all to turn off? It seems a bit ridiculous that when the requirements listed for the game say 256mb that I wouldn't be able to run it decently on a computer with 1gb in it. At this point I am at the final boss with just about everything else in the game finished, but the performance issues have been preventing me from being able to play through the whole sequence.
Thanks for all the help so far!
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I had some issues with that too (not as much as you, but sometimes the game was really getting slower), and it appeared that I hadn't enough free space on my hard drive. When I removed some stuff the game became smooth again. Try to do that (it's not sure that it will work, but it may make your computer run faster).
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This is definitely a RAM issue... although, it sounds also like a memory leak.. you say your running the Mac version.. I wonder if there is a bug that Alec is unaware of.. you may consider posting a bug report about it.. not sure where you would do that for Mac though.
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This is definitely a RAM issue... although, it sounds also like a memory leak.. you say your running the Mac version.. I wonder if there is a bug that Alec is unaware of.. you may consider posting a bug report about it.. not sure where you would do that for Mac though.
The Aquaria section of the Ambrosia Software forum is a good place to start: link. (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?s=6233ed134719c72fe404d5357789a61a&showforum=132)