Beer Good

Dumb, possibly rhetorical question.

Got the game, looks great, all the framerates look good until gunfights, doesn't matter if it's 1 or multiple characters, then it slows to 5ish frames per second. 1024x7** or 800x600 both the same.

I have P4 2.8 HT, radeon 9800 128Mb pro, 512Mb RAM... and an onboard sound chip, no probs with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (runs **** hot at 1152x??? & 1280x???). Now I have never gone in for or researched sound cards, but I understand the onboards are b*ll*cks when it comes to gameplay. Can this REALLY cause the game to slow so much? If so what do I need to spend, & on what card, if I absolutely must?

Advice appreciated.

Steve.

bigsinky

have heard that this game is a real test of your system, but 5fps, there is something wrong there. haven't got seti at home running or calculating PI to 1million places have you? on board sound shouldn't make any difference, it seems to be raw processing power. have you tried running doom3 yet. it is quite intensive as well and takes a good rig to run it properly. your pc is a real good spec so it should run all of todays games no sweat.

cheers

sinky

Beer Good

bigsinky, you are spooky........ I normally run SETI but I switched it off while running Far Cry. Are you an alien? Your 6th sense seems to be working anyway....
Seriously though, there are no hitches with the graphics other than in combat, which I guess is the point of the game!?

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

This suggests one or more of the graphics settings is set too high (SETI and other DC programs just stop during intense computer activity unless you are silly enough to set them to high priority). Gunfights tend to mean muzzle flashes, which take a lot of GPU power. Go through the detailed graphics settings and try turning various options down, particuarly flare, flashes etc. Actually from my experience you are being wildly optimisitic running that screen res unless you've turned all the rest of the eye-candy down. I've only run the demo version of that game but with the same gfx (but heavily overclocked) and way faster rig I found 1024x768 with high eye-candy was the limit.

M

Iain Young

I run it on my laptop (P4 3.2HT, 128Mb radeon 9600, 1Gb ram, onboard sound) in 1024x768 and it runs as smooth as anything. Just had to turn down the reflections etc a bit when walking through water. Not noticed any slowdown during gunfights at all.

Are you sure you haven't got any other processes running in the background that are sapping your cpu?

molko

Make sure your anti-virus is disabled, i had NAV running and it crippled my machine whilst playing that game

stevebt

iTrader: (8)

that game runs sweet on mine at 1600x1200

Beer Good

Heard those Cray's were good, but they predict the weather so badly...........

Beer Good

25 processes, CPU usage 5%... commit charge 165Mb. Fairly meaningless numbers to me, perhaps they mean somrthing to you?

Ian Cook

On my lowly P4 2.4 with Geforce 3 64mb, 1gb ram i can run both far cry and doom 3 ! admittedly not at stupidly high res but i dont get any slowdown ! far cry running at 800*600 Doom3 at a lowly 640*480 ! let the game work out the best settings and it works a treat ! in fact i am in hell at the mo ! nearly there !

Check the AV as someone has already suggested ! they are notorious !

bigsinky

sound about right for an average xp setup. try cutting down on the processes, bearing in mind if you stop some your pc will stop functioning.

alternatively you could go to Blackviper's site and take his advice on what services to have running on a gaming rig.

cheers

big sinky

fitzscoob

ran smooth on my pc joint ops is another matter though.

check out the far cry website, I am sure there was an issue with some radeon cards (as always), may be a patch that can help you out. Sorry this isnt much help, cracking game when you can get it running though

Iain Young

Hmm, seems a bit high. Mines running 48 processes and the cpu usage hovers between 0% and 1%. Have a look in the list of processes and see which one is hogging the resources.

Incidentally, I've got Norton Antivirus and firewall 2004 (the Internet Security 2004 package) installed on the machine, and it has no effect on the game whatsoever....

Iain Young

It's an Alienware Area-51m. Not cheap, but it's pretty quick

http://www.alienware.co.uk/product_d...de=SKU-EXTREME

Only downside I've found is that they come with USA keybaords, so the layout is slightly different to a UK machine....

Customer service is great as well

Ru$$Rip

download aquamark3 and run the Test Number 1. Post your scores. You should be getting 32,000 + with a 9800 Pro. Are you sure your AGP drivers are set to 8X and are actually working!??? You may need to download up to date mobo drivers for full AGP support. Anyways post your aquamark3 scores.

fitzscoob

just ran this and got 47,192 on radeon 9800xt

fps at 47.2

this sound about right?

Beer Good

Just run. Score is 43,033. Does that help?

Steve

R1916v

Guya the problem here is RAM. Far Cry is a memory hog and loves as much as you can give it, whack another 512 in there and you'll notice a big difference.

Beer Good

Despite what anyone says I am convinced it is the onboard sound that is causing the problem. Enemies can be minute (as in tiny), then when they fire, wham! pause... nothing.. then everything kicks off.

Thinking about buying a Soundblaster Audigy ZS, what do you reckon (don't need the 'Pro'! version)

Cheers
Steve.

p.s. if anyone needs any Excel help that's one thing I know a little about.