Help OFP play reduced to a crawl

[theavonlady 2]

Don't skimp. Buy/download the latest Norton AV program. Imagine had one of these been a deadly virus (like wiping out your disk on J. Edgar Hoover's birthday or whatnot).

[Tannethal 0]

Thanks for the virus hint. Will see what i dig up and report in later. So far no luck in fiddling with drivers and settings for graphics. Will report back if i find anything.

Otherwise where lived that ol vodoo doctor? Maybe he could brew me a magical cure or free my comp of pagan demons that haunt the OFP gameplay.

[sputnik monroe 102]

Well thanks for the help guys. Nothing seems to be working though.

What I have finally decided to do is to just reformat and see if that helps. So you probably wont hear from me for a while. Getting back to working order after a reformat takes me forever.

I did try the online virus scan you linked to Placebo. It found one virus and cleaned it. After a second scan it found the same virus again but said it was uncleanible so I chose the delete option. in addition to that I got a free virus scan (symantec)from a friend.

Well guys thanks for the help, wish me luck.

[Placebo 29]

Good luck

[theavonlady 2]

One last thought:

Do you have non-matching memory sticks?

[Tannethal 0]

Let's sum it up:

Virus nill found

Spyware nill found

tried different driver

45.23 this time.

Got now some 20-30 fps, still nothing to be comfortable with but it's way better than the 15 fps i got in Battlefield before.

S!

[Tannethal 0]

Now hold your breath!

Installed the Inqisitorweapons pack with ECP config and even get higher fps. Now this struck me odd.

Play OFP you'll be always in for surprises.

It's a bit frustrating now,sometimes it will run with decent FPSsometimes it won't. Stillhit the 10fps wall regulary with unit ladden missions, with and without the ECP config.

All in all i tried now nearly every tuning suggestion in this board and two other boards as well. Still haven'tcome up with a solution to this. I still suspect that XP somehow has problems with OFP, but again others don't have them. So the answer mustlie within my system, either hardwareor software.

If anyone is up to an educated guess please do so. I'm rather lost.

S!

[Phleep 0]

Thanks for the link Sanctuary. I tried a few of the older drivers with no improvement.

     I guess I'm just out of luck.

      Tannethal's framerate is identical to mine. Battlefield is about 14 FPS for me. That's with all dxdll features off and no addons. Do I need a new video card? More ram? Is it even possible to have 2 gigs of ram?

      I'm thinking about uninstalling and starting from scratch. Could that possibly help?

       I really wish I could just squeeze out 10 FPS more. I mean even with one squad of MAP marine I drop to 18 FPS. Are they really that processor hungry of units.

       How in the world does every one play with their views set to 2500? I would be happy just to get a good frame rate at 1000.

       I am so depressed.

I have a GF4 4200 128MB (drivers v44.xx) and get similar frame rates with ECP and dxdll.exe running and a view distance of 1000m.

My CPU is only a Althlon 1700 and has similar performance to my old 1400.

specs:

cpu: Athlon 1700

RAM: 2x256MB generic PC2100

vid: GF4 Ti4200 128MB

mobo: Gigabyte 7N400-Pro

OS: Windows XP Pro

Can't remember other details and at work at present.

[sputnik monroe 102]

Well I'm back from my reformat. Clean install no mods no nothing patched up to 1.96. 10 to 14 FPS average. I'm losing hope faster than ever.

This game is incredible and I've stood by it for 3 years now. Since I've started playing other games and getting an average of 35 FPS in them, Flashpoint is just frustrating. It's the most jerky and choppy game I own. I'm really losing interest in it and I never thought that would be possible.

For the first time ever I'm really thinking about uninstalling it. That is until I can afford a new video card maybe. I have barely enough money to survive at the moment so It'll be a long time before I can upgrade this computer. It's just lame that this game doesn't run on my system. There has got to be a solution.

It sound like maybe the Geforce4 ti4200 is to weak for this game.

[scruffy 22]

Settings at 800x600:

LODs highest, frames highest

Shouldn't LODs be lowest? If LOD settings are high, the game will always use the best model, even if its 800m away.

Other than this, I have no idea what you could do, what hasn't been already said.

[sanctuary 19]

The higher the LOD is , the more ugly it will look, and so logically the most performance can be reach.

But while tweaking OFP graphics, i learned that logic is not always valid there.

>Sputnik Monroe

If this time you are sure your system is clean from virus and spywares, copy paste here the content of your Flashpoint.cfg and your User.cfg (the User.cfg can be found in ...\Codemasters\Operation Flashpoint\Users\YourOwnUserName\..)

Judging from a previous post, there is certainly something that can be done, as you have a way more powerfull system than i have.

[KeyCat 131]

Sputnik Monroe and Tannethal, what OS did you run last time you had OFP installed? Could it have been Windows 98 or ME?

For me I have very bad performence when running OFP under XP Pro (clean and optimized) and estimate a fps loss of ~15-20 fps. Booting the machine to Windows 98 SE and running the exact same OFP installation everything is fine and I can run in 1600x1200 with high detail on everything...

There is defiantly difference in OFP performence between XP and Win 98/ME (even with same gfx driver version)...

/Christer (a.k.a KeyCat)

[Tannethal 0]

@keycat: Yes I had run OFP previously on basically the same rigbutunder win98. It ran fine remeber to have had the Lods at max and a viewdistance of 1500 and got pretty fluent gameplay.

Switched to WinXP Pro and made a clean reinstall of OFP. Now I'm stuck with this crawl fps on the autodetect settings.

Unfortunately switched to NTFS in the process of going to XPPro so no Win98 partition anymore.

Ahhh this sucks. Neither I have the time nor the ambition to reinstall everything and add a Win98 partition too.

[Tannethal 0]

A possible solution to OFP running very slow!

Since I expirienced serve problems in running OFP fluent on my rig i had tried every tweek within OFP and with my system in general to improve my framerate at autodetect settings and had no success. So I left that one since nothing seemed to help.

Now I've had problems with sound playback in Vietcong and remebered the PCI Latency Patch for VIA Chipsets.

So installed this patch and solved the issiue with the crackling sound in Vietcong. Now as i started OFP I noticed a big improvement in the framerate. Having used the demanding Battlefield Single Mission as benchmark my framerate improved from 8-10 at startup to 25-30. The island animation played after the mission also went up by 15-20 fps.

So let's sum it up.

IF your motherboard is based on a early VIA chipset,like any K?133?, KT266, KM266, KT266A and KT333, you might try out the VIA Latency patch by George Breese. If your motherboard uses a KT400 or above it's useless,since the problem with PCI transactions was addressed by VIA with these chipsets.

The patch can be found at:

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

Some remarks on this patch:

First: It's intended for the mentioned VIA Chipsets to solve problems with crackling sound and bad Raid controler performance, but it will improve PCI access in general.

Note also that VIA hasn't solved this problem with it's own drivers. However VIA made a raid performance patch avaiable, so if you are hesitant to try the PCI Latency patch try this VIA patch. It's been reported that it does basically the same as the PCI Latency patch. The last revision of the offical VIA Raid performance patch was 1.10 if memory serves me right. You will have to search VIA Arena for the file.

Second: If you don't have a problem with OFP performance and own a early VIA chipset based motherboard you may try it out, but rule of thumb: Don't try to fix anything that isn't broken.

Third: If you have a early VIA chipset based motherboard and use a raid controler you might even suffer a degration in performance. Tests with the last revision of that patch are indicating that. In this case you might try out a earlier release of the patch. However it might be a bit difficult to come by them, since on the page only the last revision is offered. You will have to search the net for earlier releases and investsome time in finding the best version for you. There are also some test on the net available that can give a general direction.

Fourth: On the page of George Breese it is stated the patchmight not work with Win XP SP2. I have SP2 installed and was able to install the patch, so this might come down to trying it out.

A more general tweek suggestion: In the system Bios you may try to activate bank interleave for your memory. This will speed upmemory addressing in general and will work regardless of the PCI Latency patch use. I've enabled 4 bank interleave and it improved performance a bit. This setting is found in the memory timing settings in BIOS.

So i hope this will help some of you.

S!

[KeyCat 131]

Nice find Tannethal!

Since I have an KT266A MB this may explain why I experience poor performance when running OFP in XP Pro....

Will try the PCI Latency patch (after a complete backup) and see what it does for me! Actually I've been on that site before and used another tweak he has listed that fixed the crackling sound in OFP under XP with my SB Live soundcard.

/Christer (a.k.a KeyCat)

[Baphomet 0]

One key thing I hadn't seen mentioned is -anything- regarding SP2. I've read and heard many many many a complaint about windows SP2 being absolute shite for games in general.

Glad to see you might have gotten the problem already sorted, but still... in my humble opinion. Stay awayyyyy from SP2. Like the bloody plague!

I wish they had a patch like that for intel chipsets that have problems with SB live cards. That'd be mighty useful.

[jolivan77 0]

Hi!

Where can I find that reference mission called "Battlefield"?

[Placebo 29]

Hi!

Where can I find that reference mission called "Battlefield"?

It's a mission from Cold War Crisis that comes with "Ultimate Upgrade 3"

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/download/patches_30.html

[sanctuary 19]

there exactly