Slow game with a Nvidia Ti4000

[Eriel]

Hi, my the game runs really SLOOOOOOOOOOW~, i have P4 3.0, 1GB Ram, and a Nvidia Gforce TI4000, with the most recent drivers...
I dont know what to do... i've searched the forums, but the only thing i've found is for either laptops or ATI graphics card.


Help

[Alec]

Nvidia cards are weird.

There may be something with the card settings that you can do.

Other than that, I don't know yet...

[Ataraxia]

Nvidia cards are only weird because they are the best

Anyways, have you tried the basic stuff like trying to run at a lower resolution, turning off framebuffer effects etc. ? Also, make sure there is as little as possible running in the background while the game is running. If all else fails, it might be time to upgrade that vid card

[Alec]

Hrm is the Ti4000 good or not? I can't remember.

[Eriel]

Its a TI 4200 AGP8X, my bad for mistaking the card 

[Ataraxia]

It was amazing for it's time! But it's pretty ancient compared to the current line-up of video cards. As reference, it's older than a Nvidia GeForce 5200.

[Alec]

Hmm, but the game runs okay on GeForce 2 / GeForce 4MX usually.

I know someone with a newish GeForce card that can only get 1 fps, which really confuses me. (he has XP as well!)

[Ataraxia]

Now that is strange!! Those are the types of things that can usually be fixed by simply updating the driver...  and it's usually in Vista where those problems crop up. Although, some drivers work better with different cards. What I'm saying is sometimes the most recent driver won't necessarily be the best driver for *your* card. So perhaps that is the case here?

It appears that Forceware 89.24 is the optimal driver for GeForce 4 series cards. So, Eriel, maybe try downgrading to that version? I'm shooting from the hip so to speak, but hopefully this helps.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the source I got that information from hasn't been updated in about a year and a half, so there more than likely is a better driver to be used with that card.

[The_GoldFish]

It was amazing for it's time! But it's pretty ancient compared to the current line-up of video cards. As reference, it's older than a Nvidia GeForce 5200.

It is of course about 2-3 times faster than an FX 5200, but yes... They're about as fast as eg FX5600s and have basically the same reliable directX/OGL  support (due to nVidia infamously using 32 bit "2.0" shaders instead of 24 and ruining an entire generation of graphics cards in a gambit which didn't pay off until SM3.0 -_-). If the game runs fine on a fast GF2 or 4MX then a Ti42 shouldn't have any issues at all, especially on minimum settings which I assume they've both tried.

As an aside, and more ontopic perhaps, when crushingly low FPS are obtained (like Alec's 1FPS guy), with Introversion's Darwinia at least, this often tended to be actually caused by sound driver issues (but I think that might simply have been a symptom of Darwinia's dodgy sound engine) - my advice would be to check you have up to date sound drivers, but this is a bit of a long shot.