Battlefield 1942 slowness

[Avalanche 0]

So, here's my problem:

 

As anyone who read my thread on my recent CPU lockups knows, I just upgraded my CPU, Motherboard, and RAM (see my sig for specs).

 

But now Battlefield 1942 runs much much slower than it did on my system with the older parts.

 

It ran @ 800x600x32bit with high detail and hardware accelerate audio when my system was a 1.2Ghz t-bird Athlon, kt133a chipset mobo running SDRAM, with not super-high, but perfectly acceptable frame rates.

 

Now, with identical settings in the game it runs seriously choppy, really so bad I can't even play it. I even lowered the resolution to 640x480, and it's still really bad.

 

I updated with the patch to ver 1.1, and it helped very slightly, but not as much as it should have.

 

And I do know that my video card is slow for this game, but like I said it ran okay before on a slower system, so it should run at least as good now. I don't get it.

[braden 0]

First of all, try upgrading to version 1.2 of Battlefield. It has a ton of improvements over 1.1 and might solve your problem outright.

 

Another thing you might want to try is lowering all your sound settings in Battlefield. Turn off hardware acceleration (if it's on) and lower the channel settings to the lowest possible.

 

Hope that helps!

[Avalanche 0]

Well I installed the 1.2 patch, and if anything it made the situation worse. Now even the intro movies are choppy when they play.

 

I also did the sound tweaks you suggested, and they didn't help at all with frame rates, just made the sound crappy.

 

It's so strange, could the game maybe have some problem with either the kt400 chipset or AthlonXP cpus?

[Bursar 0]

Maybe it's your motherboard drivers.

 

Are you running the latest BIOS/drivers for it?

[Avalanche 0]

Indeed I am sir.

 

4in1s v4.45

Newest bios (version F8 )

 

I noticed though that my AGP Apature size on this new board is set by default to 128Mb, is that maybe a bit high? I know that it was set to 64Mb on my old board.

[braden 0]

This is very odd. Did you do a complete reinstall of WinXP when you upgraded or was it inplace?

 

I can't really think of anything else that would cause this slowness. You may want to check out the EA forums at http://www.battlefield1942.com and see if anyone is having the same problem. I feel like I heard about something like this over there.

 

Also, I'd leave the 1.2 patch in place if you play online. They solved so many issues with the net code, response time and balance issues. It's like a completely different game.

[Avalanche 0]

Oh yes, I reinstalled right after I got the new components installed, I do that quite often lately it seems. :-)

 

I was already wandering through their forums, and yes, there are several people that have this inexplicable slowness going on, but nobody seems to know what is causing it, or how to fix it.

 

PS.

 

Should I maybe try DX9? I've heard it's pretty well still a beta even after the official release and that's why it's not available through Windows Update yet.

[Avalanche 0]

Well I got it to play much better. I ran nvHardpage, and forced the nVidia drivers to turn off vSync in D3D. That made a bit of a difference, but not much.

 

I decided to do a bit of comparing, and I installed UT2003. It was also much slower than it used to be on my old hardware, so I knew there was something besides individual game issues going on here.

 

I went into the BIOS and rummaged around, and decided I'd set my AGP apature size down to 64Mb from 128Mb. WOW!!! Instant success in UT2003. It was back the way it should be, maybe a bit better than before (as it should be, faster hardware and all).

 

in Battlefield 1942 the results weren't quite so stark, but they were better. I set the audio back down one more time, and it appears to be at about the framerate it was on my old hardware. It's a little suspicious still. It should be the same if not a little faster, even with using the same video card.

[braden 0]

Interesting. I didn't know Aperture made such a big difference in performance. I think mine is set pretty high. I'll change mine and see if it makes any difference.

[Avalanche 0]

Well I guess it was some kind of fluke, cause today my framerates were back down like they were before.

 

Lots happened since then, so I'll fill everybody in.

 

I decided to downgrade my chipset drivers to 4in1 v4.43. No differnce.

 

I started to get really really frustrated with the whole thing, so I called up a friend of mine and twisted his arm into letting me test out my system using his Radeon 9500Pro 128Mb.

 

So what I was expecting to see was that even if the new card didn't fix the problem at hand, it would at least have enough horsepower to make it unnoticable.

 

Wrong!

 

No better performance, not even slightly between my GeForce2 and his Radeon 9500Pro. That is just not right!

 

Tell me if this seems right to you:

Specs:

AthlonXP 1800+

kt400 mobo

512Mb pc2700 (@166Mhz btw)

Radeon 9500Pro 128Mb

 

Getting a 3DMark2001SE score of 5700?

 

It should be around the 10,000 - 12,000 range.

 

I get the same score with my GeForce installed.

 

And even though that score is higher than I got with my old setup, game performance, not just Battlefield 1942, but all games is substantially slower than it was when I was running an Athlon 1.2Ghz.

 

Yet when I do PCMark benchmarks, my scores are right on for CPU and harddrive performance, SiSoft Sandra tells me everything is hunkydorry.

 

Hard drive and ram throughput are just fine.

 

Something is seriously messed up but hell if I can figure out what!

[Avalanche 0]

Another update. I installed DirectX 9. It didn't help or hinder.

 

Everything is the same with it as before, in fact when I did the DirectDraw and Direc3D diagnostics from within dxdiag, they were noticeably choppy too, both before and after installing DX9.

[Mr.Guvernment 0]

Quote:

Interesting. I didn't know Aperture made such a big difference in performance. I think mine is set pretty high. I'll change mine and see if it makes any difference.

if i am correct, which i am likely not?, the bios setting basically tells windows, or your system how much memory your video card has for processing textures and such, if you say 128, it is going to try and cramp in 128mb of textures into a 64mb card - causing problems - that size should be the same as what your video card actually has for memory.

[Avalanche 0]

Actually as I understand it, it's not to tell the OS how much memory your video adapter has, but how much system memory can be allocated for processing of AGP information, if the video card needs to offload anything from the card.

 

At least that's how I understand the description in the BIOS Optimization Guide at Adrian's Rojak Pot.

 

Perhaps I misunderstood entirely.

 

But it doesn't matter, it didn't make the difference I orignally thought it did.

 

I'm gonna swap out the ram tomorrow and see what difference that makes.

[Avalanche 0]

Well I figured it out.

 

Finally!

 

It was the USB 2.0 drivers from VIA. Uninstalling them didn't help, so I used system restore to before I installed them in the first place and everything is fine.

 

I sure hope VIA puts out a new version soon, cause I can't be the only person who had this problem.

 

I'm gonna go over to the via arena forums and see what I can find.