video performance tweaks

[kholemann]

I have a P 4 2.66 with 1 GB RAM and an ATI AIW9800. Things sometimes go well and sometimes they crawl... funny thing, when on the overview map of the atlantic, thats where it seems to come to a crawl alot.

So...

Since this is my secondary computer I decided to take it off of my network and disable everything uneeded in startup including my norton antivirus (which I discovered, liked to start doing a cleanup while I was playing and that really slowed everything down).

The only stuff I left was a few of the ATI driver things.

If anyone has an ATI AIW9800 (or similar card) what settings do you use?

I put mine on full everything. Funny... when I had them less than that the lettering on all of the dials on all the instruments was fuzzy but when I turned everything up full they were no longer fuzzy.

[jasonb885]

I have a P 4 2.66 with 1 GB RAM and an ATI AIW9800. Things sometimes go well and sometimes they crawl... funny thing, when on the overview map of the atlantic, thats where it seems to come to a crawl alot.
...

Yes.

That's because the developers choose not to give the UI priority when the game is handling the task of moving ships around the world during high time compression usage. Unless you have a super computer it seems you'll end up with some lag on the navigation map screen.

Myself, it gets laggy for me at 128x around convoys, 512x around ship concentrations of less than a dozen, and 1024x all the time.

Sigh.

[Teufelschiff]

Good old lag question. The game was running perfectly for about a month, and now I'm experiencing some severe lag. But then come to think of it I started running into more ships etc, and by reading the posts on lag, that may be a source of what I'm experiencing - I guess call it Task Force Lag.

I added another 512 RAM today, bringing me up to 1Gb., and still - massive video and sound lag in the attack scope. After about three minutes, the lag clears up and it's go time. Before launching the game I make sure no programs are running or in the background. I turned down the acceleration on my sound. Anything I need to do to my video? Thoughts? Anything I can tweak? :|\

XP Pro, SP2
Pent 4, CPU 2.0 GHz
1G RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 64.0 MB
Direct X 9.0c

Thanks for any help and advice.

[panthercules]

I turned down the acceleration on my sound.

What kind of sound card do you have? I could be wrong about this, but I think I've heard/read that turning down the acceleration on your sound card simply shifts some of the processing burden away from your sound card's hardware and puts that burden on your CPU/software, so unless you're having sound card-related problems or have some older sound card that can't handle the acceleration in its hardware, it would seem to me that turning down sound card acceleration would likely worsen this sort of CPU-based lag rather than improve it. From back when I was prowling the IL-2 forums it seemed that folks there were saying that if you have an Audigy (or at least an Audigy 2 anyway) that you should be better off leaving your sound acceleration all the way up.

[Stary Wuj]

:D

Old "wet periscope" problem again.
I have one solution (still ATI Radeon 9700)

ALT -TAB for few seconds when You see through
periscope. Something wrong with RAM management
in this game, so - it works.

Best Regards

Stary Wuj

[gordonmull]

Nice one Stary Wuj! That little problem's been bugging me for a while. My only solution has been to reload the game or reboot the computer when it happens...there doesn't seem to be any consistency - sometimes problem sometimes not. I'll give the alt-tab thing a try pronto.

Kholemann, I disable everything unneccessery before running SHIII but I can't seem to get rid of norton antivirus. If I close it down, every couple of minutes the computer goes back to windows to inform me that norton has been disabled (helpful little norton, telling me things I already know :D ), I can't find it in the task manager either. How did you do it?

[EmZeD45]

Hi All,

GordonMull, I use a little program called "End it All" (it's not for topping yourself when you have had enough! LOL) :D but it will terminate any background windows progarms that you want to stop :up:

Read about it and get it here :-----> http://www.docsdownloads.com/Tier1/enditall.htm (It is my kind of price - Free :rock: ) they have some other good stuff at that site too.

Saves you having to mess with task manager, but if you want to and your using XP Ctrl+Alt+Del should bring task manager up for you.

BTW a question with regard to the reply about turning down the sound acceleration - do you get crappier sound if you turn it down? I still suffer with the game lock-up problem now and then with the sound stuck in a loop - I think I read it here somewhere that this may be related to a sound problem. I have a Creative Blaster Live 5.1 and I have reloaded all the drivers but I still get this bloody annoying lock-up. But I love the sounds in this Sim so much I did not want to reduce it's quality.

Cheers

[Teufelschiff]

All great suggestions, thank you for the responses.

turning down the sound acceleration - do you get crappier sound if you turn it down?

I did not notice a reduction in sound quality by turning down the acceleration.

[thecaptain]

No doubt about it. I've been using the alt-tab solution for some months now and it always cures the lag that I've expereinced during the "wet" periscope views. Works better if you have at least one gig of ram, though.

[kholemann]

I find that if I turn down the mipmap level or whatever the hell that is, things seem to clear up... I typically wind up leaving everyting turned to the lowest quality setting anyway.

Use this to stop any programs from running:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

[gordonmull]

Cheers EmZeD45! I got End It All and it allowed me to free up loads of resources. I can even use the harbour traffic mod without it all sticking. Yay! :up:

Alt-tab = :rock:

Thanks guys!

[EmZeD45]

Nice one GordonMull - Glad I could help !

Keep on Rockin! :rock: (Hmm Most likely side to side in bad weather LOL)

[kiwi_2005]

LOL This is suppose to happen the lag when in high compression, if you were to able to stop this lagg then you would own one of those CRAY Computers! In other words accept the lag, it doesn't bother my gameplay. If i were to get lag or slowdowns when in 1x then i did be very worried. The biggest resource user would be whats running in the background. Turning of System Restore in WinXP can stop alot of slowdowns

[vils]

set vertical sync to off, its totally useless anyways but steal resourses..

[Curval]

Alt-tab crashes the game every single time for me.

[klh]

I use a little program called "End it All" (it's not for topping yourself when you have had enough! LOL) :D but it will terminate any background windows progarms that you want to stop :up:


Another useful utility is called FSAutoStart, which is available on flight simulator sites. It allows you to customize which processes and applications are stopped, and then defrags your RAM. It can even reverse the process after you're done playing, although I usually just reboot.

[Krieg-Schwein]

Here is a lowrisk trick to load the drivers and services you want in a windows profile!!

If you Right click My computer> Properties>> Hit the Hardware tab and Goto Hardware Profiles ..

once in there you use the copy profile and name it what ever you want.. close My Computer Properties

that done go to Control panel>> Administrative tools and click the services Icon!!

once in there look along the top and hit the STATUS on the very top and it will line up all of the current services currently running on your computer.

Double click on any of the services stated as running and you will see a tab called PROFILE and the new profile that you just made in the Hardware profile will be listed in it..
Then simply disable that service in your newly created profile

The point of all of this is that when windows now starts up it will show the default profile and the new profile that you created when window starts up for about 15 seconds OR what ever you made it to show in the Hardware Box and you can choose the one you want to load !!!

IF I confused you here is a website that can explain it better than I can

http://www.maxpc.co.uk/tutorials/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=7862&subsectionid=710