Performance problem with Ultima9...

K

Kevb

New member
Hello everybody,

I apologize for my poor english... i'm french...

I switch from a Banshee 3dfx card to a Radeon 32 DDR and now U9 is very slow when
i run or move the mouse rapidly.

I have the last beta driver and the last patch (118f) for U9.

I tried to improve perf. by using compressed 16 bit texture and it doesn't work (U9 return to the desktop).

I think that it is due to the loading of the texture becuase there is a lot of access to my hd.

I tried to defrag with no result...

Do you have an idea to make compressed texture work?

They say in the manual that i work for all recent card (like the GeForce...).

Do you have example of direct3d game that use compressed texture with success ?
 
Speaking of texture compression, check out the link I am posting at the bottom. They compare the RADEON, GeForce2 and Voodoo5.

The Radeon is clearly the best, the Voodoo5 is decent, and the GeForce2 just plain SUCKS.

In fact, the texture compression on the GeForce2 is BROKEN and doesn't even work most of the time. It's really pitiful, and shows yet another example of how Nvidia's image quality is sub-par.

A few Quotes from the well written article:

"So, given the importance of texture compression as an essential feature, I am more than a little disturbed that the nVidia implementation of texture compression seems to have serious problems."

As an example of texture compression in the typical (opaque) case, witness the following Radeon screenshots: The compressed version, on the right, is basically identical to the non-compressed screenshot. This is the way it's supposed to work, folks.

But what happens when we use the GeForce 2? Pretty damn crappy. I have no idea why enabling compression on the GeForce2 causes these ugly discolored artifacts , but it does. And they're all over the place.

So what exactly is the problem with the GeForce2 and texture compression? Texture discoloration on opaque textures, and heavy artifacting on translucent textures. That's BAD.

Let's see how the Radeon does. I would call this perfect. I can't see any significant difference between the two shots, which is the way it should be. Bravo to ATI for a perfect implementation.

I found this to be a very well written, and honest article. It's a very good read. Several pages long with great screenshots.

We already knew the GeForce2 had sub-par image quality, but this is even more revealing.

Check it out.
http://www.gamebasement.com/pages/home.asp?nav=articles&id=31
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Verdana">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by rew:
i thought ultima 9 ran like crap on every system. :P<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

HAHA, Yep, it's true! That game IS crap.
 
Hi,
I don't know about the tatest patch for U9, all I can say is that witout any patch U9 French runs smooth and fine on my Athlon 550 with a radeon 64 Vivo in 1024*768*32... but I have to say that I'm hapy to have 194 MB of Ram...
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Ultima IX generally a glide game with D3D sort of hacked in?

Try playing other games and I think that you'll see the difference.
 
Thank you for all your answers,

I think the solution is to add more RAM to my
system (currentlty i have only 128 Mb).
 
Let me give you what I know from personal experience about U9 and the Radeon.

I've got this game too, and I like it, in spite of so many people's complaints. It's a good game that was poorly written.

Anyway, first bit of bad news is that it will ALWAYS run better on a 3dfx card than it will on the Radeon or any other non-3dfx card. It was designed from the beginning for Glide, and the Direct3d support is weak at best.

Now the good news. The Radeon runs the game much better than any other non-glide card I've seen (including the faster Geforce 2 GTS).

Here's what you do to get playable framerates:

1) Get an extra 128 megs of ram. I hate to say it, but U9 REQUIRES 256 megs to play in D3D mode. It shouldn't. It's bad design and sloppy programming from Origin, but I've tried and at 128megs it's unplayable, and at 256 it's as smooth as it's going to get (which isn't great, but is playable)...
2) Make sure the Radeon is running with the compressed textures (you may have to reinstall as a Glide install will not install these by default)

A decent hard drive doesn't hurt, either. In D3D even with 256 megs of memory, U9 will be constantly reading from the hard drive to load textures as you move around. It's the way the game was designed. Most games load textures before you enter a level. U9 has no levels so it loads as you go, which slows you down until you get playing a bit.

Personally, your smartest move would be to put back the banshee card, play the game through to the end, and then reinstall the Radeon. The Radeon is a great card, but certain older games were built for 3dfx. This is rapidly changing. Even games like UT are dumping Glide support in future engines, but for now, on older games, you can't beat 3dfx. Not because it's a good card, but because when the games were made it was the ONLY card.

Grimm
 
One other thing. I don't know which OS you are using. I've played around with it in Win98SE and Win2k. In Win98SE it's a little choppy (you can really feel the slowdown when it's accessing the HD which is all the time).. In Win2k, surprisingly (with the latest drivers it crashes with the originals) it runs VERY smoothly, more so than in 98. The only catch is there's some sort of memory leak in win2k that doesn't seem there in Win98.. So the longer you play the slower it gets and eventually it'll crash.

Anyway, that is, officially, everything I know on the subject..

Like I said, your best bet is probably to run it on your Banshee then put the Radeon in after you're done..

Grimm
 
Thank you Grimm for your answers.

My last question :
how do you succeed to launch game with compressed texture?
When i use them i return to desktop...
 
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