Poor performance in RTCW

[Damascus]

I just installed Return To Castle Wolfenstein and tried to play it and it runs very unacceptably. Its on the k6-2 500 in my profile. I have an SGRAM model Voodoo3 3000 PCI on Amigamerlin 2.9 drivers and Wicked GL 3.02. The thing is... I used to play this game, and it ran "ok", on a 1ghz athlon with the SAME exact vid. card, and played it on this computer once a few months ago and it ran "ok", then tried again last night and had this problem. The only thing thats different than last time is the addition of a faster hdd (PIOmode 4 to UDMA33) and the addition of memory (256mb to 384). All my detail settings are on lowest and GL extension is enabled. My Voodoo is also clocked at 169mhz instead of stock 166. I have DX 8.1 installed (game comes with 8.0). What could be causing this? I've tried re-installing my drivers and re-installing the game, with no luck. My PCI latency timer is set to "32", if its of any relevancy. Any help with this is greatly appreciated! Thanx everyone!


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[qrazi]

well, are you absolutely sure it ran okay before? because RTCW-ET runs only OK at low settings on my systems, an di went to my current 1600+ from a k6-2.... so i know it is a lot slower.

[Glide]

Please verify which OpenGL library the game is using. In fact the problem could be caused by an incorrect hardware configuration due to your double video card system. So RTCW could "see" Voodoo3 like Riva 128...

[Damascus]

Thanx for the replies. I might need you're help again though, I had to re-do everything on my hdd, so I'm installing RTCW again at the moment. I also installed a faster card, a Geforce4 mx420 64mb ddr agp (2x) so when its totally up ill try to play it again and see if this card can do it. I dont have a dual card system Glide, I've got 2 different systems, the Riva was in my 400mhz system. I couldnt play ghost recon with the V3 either, so i just broke down and bought an Nvidia (i know ATI is better) but I got it for $20 brand new, couldnt pass it up. I'll post on here again tonight or tomorrow with my new card results, because if the new card cant play it, somethings gotta be critically wrong with my system. Thanx again Glide and qrazy!

[Damascus]

Ok, this is worse than I thought. I just got through playing the game, and heres the problem: performance 1024x768 high quality 32bit setting is "ever so slightly" slower than the performance at 640x480 low quality 16bit. Also, overall performance with the GeForce4 MX420 64MB DDR AGP 2x is not much faster than the old Voodoo3 3000 PCI. I mean this is 166mhz vs. 250mhz GPU and SGRAM vs. DDR and AGP 2x vs. PCI. If I were guessing, I'd say the Geforce puts out maybe 5-10max FPS more, this thing should be BLOWING THE VOODOO AWAY! All I can figure is maybe somethings wrong with my memory, processor, or motherboard. 3D Mark 2000 reports my board supports AGP side band addressing but its disabled. This should boost performance enabled, right? I dont know how to enable it, theres nothing in my BIOS (or at least I think) about side band addressing. Anyone got any suggestions? Thanx everyone!

[Rolo01]

I dont think the GF4-MX420 is that fast. It is an optimised GF2 core, I think its speed will match the V5-5500. You will get some more FPS, but to blow away a V3 you need something more powerfull...

[Damascus]

The actual GPU chipset is not really what should be giving me a performance boost here, its the bus type. Its PCI (33mhz) vs. AGP (66mhz for 2x i think). And its got like triple the memory bandwidth. Im hoping the problem lies within windows using the virtual disk cache instead of all my physical memory. I'll play with that and see if it runs better...

[qrazi]

that agp vs pci isnt the bottleneck there, its your cpu.

look, a voodoo5 5500 is just as fast on a pci bus as on a agp bus, altough i admit that a pci version of a gf 2 mx is a bit slower then its agp counter part.

the big bottleneck in your system is your CPU. the amd K6-2 has a very weak FPU (Floating Point Unit) and that is exactly what is neede dmost in 3d games like RTCW. also, the k6-2 lack on-die level2 cache, instead it has it located on the motherboard.

i did play Medal of Honour: Allied Assault on my old amd k6-2+ 550mhz, but the + version has 128KB level2 cache on-die. i needed to put the details on low in some levels, although i used medium settings at 1024x768 in most levels.

i do suggest you upgrade you motherboard+cpu, at this moment it is you biggest bottleneck. perhaps a ecs k7s5a + duron fits into your budget...

[Damascus]

I just bought another system, my problem is solved I can play every single one of my games now on 1024x768x32 with detail settings as high as they'll go.
Athlon Thunderbird @ 1.2Ghz
ECS K7VMA w/ 256MB PC133 SDR
Geforce 4 MX420
Soundblaster Audigy Gamer
Fujitsu 20GB UDMA100 HDD
Still not as fast as 98% of the computers owned by the rest of these people in this forum, but I'm extremely happy with it
To Rolo01: 3D Mark 2000, Voodoo3 PCI=1688 3DMarks vs. Geforce4=2122 3D Marks. I love my voodoo, but the geforce spanks it.
Heres a tip I got from Sy at the VoodooFiles Forums, if you play RTCW, this boosts performance A LOT, this almost made it run acceptably with the K6.. \COM_MAXFPS 50  ... game cant render anything higher than 50 FPS, resulting in smoother gameplay, and you're eyes cant see the difference between 50-100 FPS anyways.

[qrazi]

Originally posted by Damascus

\COM_MAXFPS 50  ... game cant render anything higher than 50 FPS, resulting in smoother gameplay, and you're eyes cant see the difference between 50-100 FPS anyways.

nice upgrade, and i have to admit i didnt use any console command tweaks...

although i dont agree about the last part of your post...