games seem choppy, any suggestions?

[panzer 0]

I just installed Win2k pro and must say that I like it already...however, all my games, such as Diablo 2 and Starfleet Command seem to get choppy when the action gets intense. Does anyone have a remedy for this?

 

Thanks,

Panzer

[Donald2B 0]

Please post your system specs so that we might further be able to help solve your problem.

 

Without seeing any system specs I would say try different video drivers. Especially if you are running with a nVidia card. Drivers can make all the difference.

[Brian Frank 0]

Yes, please list the specs. Its like calling a mechanic and saying "My car wont start. Whats the problem?" He cant just go "Oh, yeah its this, because there are a ton of different cars out, and many have a different configuration. Same deal here. We'd love to help you, but we're helpless until we know what we're dealing with.

[panzer 0]

*******************************************

AMD Athlon TB 800

Abit KT7 (non raid)

256 mb pc 133 ram

Asus v7100 (CRT out only) V6.18 (win2000)

Sound Blaster Live! (latest driver)

Ricoh MP7060A cdrw

generic 50x cd rom

Quantum Fireball LM 20GB

********************************************

 

Any advice you can give is very much appreciated!!

Thanks!

[panzer 0]

directx 8.0a

SP1 installed

 

[DosFreak 2]

Those are terribly old drivers. Try the 12.00's www.m3dzone.com

[panzer 0]

Forgive me, I'm pretty green to this lingo - but 12.00's? 12.00's of what?

[Donald2B 0]

He is referring to the driver version. The video drivers that you are using are fairly old and outdated. I would try the 12.X drivers or even some of the older drivers. I know I have had good luck with the 10.40 drivers. You also might want to turn down the acceleration on the SBLive! down a notch so it is not running in full hardware acceleration. I have had performance hits from that.

[Almghty 0]

Everybody has already commented on your driver version so i wont do that.

 

With Win2k you need to shutdown alot of services which are not used. The list of services are on this site somewhere(?), my machine i used for dev and networking so most of my services are up.

 

Try not to have too many rubbish on your taskbar, do you really need icq , yahoo IM, MSN, etc etc running? It doesnt seem much but each one takes up the processors time.

 

Most games can be copied to the hard drive, which means the game no longer has to access the cd drive and everything runs smoother.

 

I dont really like sblives liveware (i think its buggy) so if you aren't using the 4 speaker capability of sblive then use the default drivers that came with win2k (this is juts my personal view)

[panzer 0]

To: Donald...

 

I gotcha...

 

To all: Thanks! I'll try those new drivers and diddle with the sound acceleration and tell you guys how it behaves!

 

[Donald2B 0]

You also might want to try up[censored] your VIA 4-n-1 Drivers. I just realized that...duh. Anywhoo...I know that I have had to do that for some people to make the machine run better and smoother. You can find them here:

 

http://www.viahardware.com

 

Good luck! Let me know if you continue to have problems.

[Brian Frank 0]

Yes, the 4-in-1's latest FULL version are the 4.29's I believe, and Ive seen those fix a few problems in the choppiness area. It couldnt hurt.

[ThC 129 0]

also look into getting the VIA patch and the AMD patch for windows 2k. You can probably get them from M$ or the hardware vendors site

[Brian Frank 0]

*smack* Oh yeah, that AMD patch would be very nice too. Here's the link:

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon-duron/amd_win2k_patch.html

[panzer 0]

Hey all,

 

I installed a bunch of these drivers and toned down the hardware acceleration and the games seem to work noticeably better, although still not quite up to snuff.

 

I will try the 12.00 vid card drivers next and see what happens. The reason for the hesitation is I like the utilities Asus provides...but these can be sacrificed for better performance in the end. Will keep you posted!

 

Hats off to you guys!

[ThC 129 0]

oh god your using the ASUS drivers try the nvidia drivers those will provide the best performance. If you want utilities get nvmax from http://www.nvmax.com

[Brian Frank 0]

Ive had no problems running any of the Nvidia reference drivers or betas either. Those all work great. I had some bsod's with the Hercules drivers, so I dropped those suckers fast.