Bit Blot Forum

Aquaria => Support => Topic started by: z9john on December 11, 2007, 05:01:36 am

Title: Slowdown problem.
Post by: z9john on December 11, 2007, 05:01:36 am
Hey everyone.... first off let me say that I've been really looking foward to playing this game, and DLed the demo (which I love) to check it out... but this one issue is keeping me from a purchase at the moment:

I have a fairly decent PC, able to run most 3d games pretty well, but for some reason I get these bad slowdowns (drops in framerate and a slow down of animations and swimming and such)  every once in awile.  They seem to occur mostly in areas with alot of objects on the screen, or when their is a background scene far off (forgive me for not knowing the technical term). Where I really notice it is the large area right before entering Naija's Home for the first time (after her vision).

I tried lowering everything down to the lowest settings (resolution low, vsync + mipmap + effects off) and i still get that slowdown in those same areas and at practically the same intensity.

It's weird since I can run everything on the highest settings and still get perfect framerate  in  other areas.

Im running the latest drivers (not beta) and I have pracically nothing running in the background (I turn off AV and so on)

Any suggestions?

Specs:
Windows XP Pro SP2
BFG Tech 7800 GS OC AGP
2.66 GHz Pentium 4
1 GB ram
Onboard Realtek sound card
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on December 11, 2007, 08:43:36 am
Are there any intensive video card settings on like anti-aliasing and the like?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: z9john on December 11, 2007, 05:28:14 pm
Not that I'm aware of, I just checked the Nvidia Control Panel and it seems I have most of the settings to "Let the application decide."
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: dhakkel on December 11, 2007, 05:40:45 pm
I had this, too, and I thought it was caused by me forcing AA etc. I turned them off, and the problem was gone! ... until I got to the final boss area, haha.

This morning I downloaded the latest beta drivers and installed them, and the problem is gone.. for now. I'll repost if anything bad happens.

Note that I have a 8800 GTX, so this problem should be even LESS likely to happen to me, but it still did. I think it was probably a driver issue, driver issues are funny like that.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: smjjames on December 11, 2007, 05:47:40 pm
WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE POST!













I've only had a slowdown once, and that was during the first dream sequence. But it is graphics heavy and it slows down when that creature (I couldn't see what it was exactly) which fires a big laser when you near the end. Although I've seen games where there is an intended slowdown when a big attack or something occurs. So it is most likely a normal slowdown because there are so many things happening at once.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: z9john on December 11, 2007, 06:12:06 pm
Thanks everyone for your posts!

But yeah, I tried toying around with video card settings and all, nothing seems to really work.  If it is a driver issue, maybe I should just wait for the next update or something.

Besides, all of this tweaking of the game has gotten me kinda used to the slowdown, haha.

WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE POST!


I've only had a slowdown once, and that was during the first dream sequence. But it is graphics heavy and it slows down when that creature (I couldn't see what it was exactly) which fires a big laser when you near the end. Although I've seen games where there is an intended slowdown when a big attack or something occurs. So it is most likely a normal slowdown because there are so many things happening at once.

The weird thing with that (if I'm thinking of the same scene) is that during that sequence the game runs almost perfectly.

IDK, I know it sounds weird.... I can't understand it either.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: smjjames on December 11, 2007, 06:18:38 pm
WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE POST!


I've only had a slowdown once, and that was during the first dream sequence. But it is graphics heavy and it slows down when that creature (I couldn't see what it was exactly) which fires a big laser when you near the end. Although I've seen games where there is an intended slowdown when a big attack or something occurs. So it is most likely a normal slowdown because there are so many things happening at once.

The weird thing with that (if I'm thinking of the same scene) is that during that sequence the game runs almost perfectly.

IDK, I know it sounds weird.... I can't understand it either.

maybe it is an intended slowdown as it only lasts for a few seconds while that laser is firing and otherwise acts normal. It's not an issue for me as the game acts normal. I do get a little bit of a slowdown when I accidentially ram an enemy with my shield on or I ram a projectile and it hurts. Similar with the energy god when he whacks me hard enough for the screen to go red briefly.

I do have the ripples on, so dunno.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: dhakkel on December 11, 2007, 07:04:12 pm
That enemy is a regular, non-special non-slowdown enemy, so yeah, you're having this problem too.

The only intended slowdowns in the game are when you are low on health and you get hit.
Title: Intel GMA x3100 and Dell XPS 1330 slow
Post by: nambit on December 11, 2007, 08:40:09 pm
Does anyone know if there are any issues with the Intel GMA boards?
This game is running unbearably slow on my laptop and, after waiting
about a year for the release, it's rather depressing.  I'm not sure if it's
a driver thing or not, but here's my system details:

Dell XPS 1330 notebook
Intel GMA x3100 integrated graphics (based on 965 chipset I believe)
2.0Ghz Intel Core2Duo T7250
2 GB 667 ram.
Windows Vista 32 Premium

Any help would be appreciated.  I have to resort to 640x480 for the game
to be playable.

For the record, Vista rates my graphics card a 3.5.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: z9john on December 11, 2007, 09:12:48 pm
That enemy is a regular, non-special non-slowdown enemy, so yeah, you're having this problem too.

The only intended slowdowns in the game are when you are low on health and you get hit.

Yea, I guess I should just clarify that when I meant slowdown I meant there was a framerate drop.  When I get hit when my health is low the framerate is still good even though the action slows down.

My bad.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: smjjames on December 12, 2007, 01:42:40 am
That enemy is a regular, non-special non-slowdown enemy, so yeah, you're having this problem too.

The only intended slowdowns in the game are when you are low on health and you get hit.

Yea, I guess I should just clarify that when I meant slowdown I meant there was a framerate drop.  When I get hit when my health is low the framerate is still good even though the action slows down.

My bad.

How do I look at the framerate? just wondering.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: dhakkel on December 12, 2007, 01:43:12 am
Use a program that shows it, like Fraps or something.

There is no ingame command afaik.
Title: Re: Intel GMA x3100 and Dell XPS 1330 slow
Post by: nambit on December 15, 2007, 02:16:32 pm
Bump.... so I guess I'm S.O.L. on this issue as no one replied.  :(

Does anyone know if there are any issues with the Intel GMA boards?
This game is running unbearably slow on my laptop and, after waiting
about a year for the release, it's rather depressing.  I'm not sure if it's
a driver thing or not, but here's my system details:

Dell XPS 1330 notebook
Intel GMA x3100 integrated graphics (based on 965 chipset I believe)
2.0Ghz Intel Core2Duo T7250
2 GB 667 ram.
Windows Vista 32 Premium

Any help would be appreciated.  I have to resort to 640x480 for the game
to be playable.

For the record, Vista rates my graphics card a 3.5.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Mush Man on December 16, 2007, 06:45:04 am
Shit post. Please ignore.

Edited: 22 March 2011
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: nambit on December 16, 2007, 07:03:15 am
Hey Nambit! I'm a fellow Vista user.

OK, my "Game Graphics" rates as my base score of 3.4, however, I run the game fine, if anything, too fast. I haven't actually played the actual game on my Vista yet, but the game runs absolutely fine. I was running the game using my Gran's comp and suffered some choppy and slow gameplay (I got up to the first save point on that one, not because I suck but because I'm not dedicating much time to Aquaria). All I can say is "grin and bear it". Or buy some better hardware. I'm sure the game runs fine on your Desktop PC, right?

Sigh, I just spent a bundle on this laptop and it can't play this game right.
You see, the laptop is hooked up to my plasma TV, so  you can imagine I really
want to play the game on the laptop.  The desktop is in the other room.  I really
don't understand why it's so bad with the gma x3100 as it should be fine enough
for this game.  I even tried XP and the game still lagged.  I moved the desktop into
the room where my plasma is and man, at 60 fps, the thing is amazing on the
plasma.  I had to put the desktop back, though, as it clutters my condo living room.

To think an Athlon X2 (3800) desktop with a measly Geforce 7300GS card (128Mb)
is smoking my 2.0Ghz Core2duo laptop with all the fixins (and 2GB ram)... hurts.
I'm still hoping it's a simple driver issue that intel will resolve. :'(
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Quemaqua on December 16, 2007, 07:47:41 am
I get a strange slowdown problem in a couple areas where the game just starts to randomly slow and get progressively slower the longer I spend there.  One seems to be because of those little buggy things that spawn more of themselves... those seem to chug the system after a few minutes.  But then I also got it on the Frozen Veil, where there was nothing of that kind that I could tell.  And it started full speed, then just got gradually slower and slower until I was down to probably 15 FPS or something.

Pretty beefy rig for this game, don't think the trouble is strictly graphical.

2.21GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2
2 gigs RAM, using XP
have a 7800GT, AC97 onboard audio, etc.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on December 16, 2007, 12:13:16 pm
Sound drivers maybe?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Quemaqua on December 16, 2007, 06:01:50 pm
If that was in response to my post and not someone else's, I did just update the drivers due to a fresh XP install.  And it's only in that area and the two places with those little egg-layers (the populations seem to have no cap).  Also, I forgot to mention that going into a new area clears the problem up instantly and if I go back, the affected area is fine.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on December 16, 2007, 06:55:50 pm
Yeah, the Krill population can get out of hand lol.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Quemaqua on December 16, 2007, 10:54:22 pm
But they're so horribly lovable.  Or lovably horrible.  Or something.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: 2disbetter on December 18, 2007, 05:44:54 pm
Your measly 7300GS is prolly better than the built in video of your laptop. It's a common misconception that a fast processor means fast video and graphic performance. The CPU now a days can only do so much.

Try cranking down the resolution on your Laptop, that shoudl help boost your frame rates.

2d
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Mika on December 20, 2007, 06:25:59 pm
I also get some slowdowns in various places. I have had my fps gone down to 39 from the normal 75 on an occasion. So far I haven't been able to reproduce it very efficiently though.


I'm running
Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.8ghz
2 gigs of ram
Radeon X1950 Pro
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on March 30, 2008, 09:26:40 pm
The game seems to be good stuff, but I'm having trouble with the demo. I'm running it on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 1630 laptop, meaning amd64 +3700 with 1gt of ram, ATI mobility Radeon 9700 and windows XP sp2. My computer runs many modern games like HL2 or Team Fortress 2 great, but for some reason Aquaria runs 1-5fps all the time. I've tried all options but nothing changes, it just hogs 100% CPU and runs extremely slowly, right from the start. Never had the patience to wait for the game itself to load. Since the demo seems to be version 1.0, is there a chance that some patch I saw for the full version might fix this? I'm using the latest omega drivers for my graphics card.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on March 31, 2008, 02:32:04 am
Usually its due to driver problems. (audio and/or video) You could try sending me your debug.log and we could see if there's anything weird in it.

zaphire@gmail.com
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on April 14, 2008, 12:17:13 am
Haven't been able to solve the problem as of yet, any ideas?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Xiagan on April 14, 2008, 10:18:15 am
Did you send your debug.log?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on April 14, 2008, 03:08:13 pm
Yea, and there were some audio errors. I updated / reinstalled my video / audio drivers, but to no avail. Haven't got a response from Alec since.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on April 18, 2008, 08:45:36 pm
Yea, and there were some audio errors. I updated / reinstalled my video / audio drivers, but to no avail. Haven't got a response from Alec since.

You were getting a ton of audio errors, are they still happening?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on April 23, 2008, 03:11:19 pm
They are less frequent. In my recent test, they only appeared in the intro section (before the main screen). I'm not sure whether they were caused by my alt-tabbing or the stuttering intro. To my amazement the music and speech in the game ran fluently although the fps was still ~5. There were also only a few errors in the section after pressing the start game button.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on April 23, 2008, 11:22:07 pm
Hmm probably a graphics problem then...

They're usually fixed by updating/changing drivers, or changing the advanced graphics options in your card's driver's control panel. (e.g. sometimes settings relating to the way textures are handled help)

You could try setting the game into 16-bit and playing with the settings that way if you haven't already. That might clue us in to some other setting that might be messing with things. (desktop color depth or a video card control panel setting)

One other thing you can try is turning debugLog off in usersettings.xml, but that probably won't make much of an impact.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on April 24, 2008, 09:53:19 pm
I've already been running in 16-bit mode. The settings in the game options have little effect, approx. +/- 1-3 fps. When toying with the texture options in ati tray tools something changed, but I'm not sure it was better after the tweaks. Disabling logging did nothing. Sorry for being such a pain. =) Any additional debugging options I could enable to get some more info?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Flazhok on April 30, 2008, 01:42:09 pm
same problem as ripla :(

although i got an old radeon 8800 64 mb :)
athlon 2000 xp
512 mb ram

is it theoretically enough to run a game without lags or i shouldn't even try?
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Alec on May 01, 2008, 04:29:18 pm
That should be able to run the game fine, so it sounds like a driver or settings problem.
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: ripla on August 21, 2008, 08:16:08 pm
I finally found a solution. I found it while searching for a fix to a similar problem with another game, Eternity's Child. The game had great debug logs and clear warnings which lead me to the problem: wrong OpenGL version (Windows default dll) was detected and used. I've attached the registry patch I used to fix this problem.  For reference, my card is ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 and I'm running Windows XP SP3 with Omega Drivers.

EDIT:
Or would have attached if the attach functionality had been enabled. Great... Here is the code, just copy&paste this into (e.g.) openglfix.reg and double click to execute.

Code: [Select]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\OpenGLDrivers\ati2dvag]
"Dll"="atioglxx.dll"
"DriverVersion"=dword:00000001
"Flags"=dword:00000001
"Version"=dword:00000002
Title: Re: Slowdown problem.
Post by: Danger Mouse on August 21, 2008, 09:06:15 pm
Nice, I'll have to keep this as a reference because my other laptop has the exact same graphics card as yours and same operating system. I haven't been able to install on that one currently since I need to replace the Hard drive. I had a cyclic redundancy error,... possibly from shock or something, but regardless the Hard drive is toast. Been looking at getting a nice 500GB 2.5" drive that's now available for a fairly reasonable price. Almost tempted to just give up that laptop and get a new one though in October. *shrug*