Sluggish FPS on WinXP

[Malick]

Hi all !

First of all I am very nicely surprised to see UFO AI reach such a level of development. I want to thank the dev and all the people that helped them working on this.

The game installs and runs nicely. Except one thing : once I get in 3D maps (or affecting soldiers to a craft, where the soldiers and weapons model appear on screen), the game gets so laggy that it's unplayable. Usually, I have a steady 50 frames/sec but as soon a 3D model appears, that gets down to 4-6 frames...

I have an AMD4600 X2 with WinXP SP2, 2Go DDRam and nVidia GF7900GT. What do you think could be the problem ?

Otherwise, I love all the new (and old) features. Very very good job !

Malick

[Kaerius]

Same here, it chugs in tactical missions, not unplayable, but it's barely.

My specs:
Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz
2 gig DDR2-PC6400
Geforce 8800GTS
Win XP pro, SP2

I mean, come on, I can run Gothic 3 on high(and that's an extremely badly optimized game.) Something on the quake 2 engine shouldn't be this laggy.

[Kaerius]

Update: On some maps, it doesn't chug at all, on some it chugs something fierce(the disco map for one.) Thought it was the fires at first, but another map with a huge burning ufo wreck didn't chug at all, and that map was maybe 4x as large as the disco map.

Also might be related to sound? I know decreasing the sound quality to 11khz increased my performance.

[Zenerka]

Maybe related to breakable addons. Mattn? (Somehow I doubt it).

[Mattn]

can you give us more examples of maps that don't work - that would help us to nail the problem down.

thankyou

[Malick]

Well, after some testing this night, it appears that after a while (30 minutes) everything gets back to normal.

What happens : the game works fine, except when 3D objects are on screen (soldiers model in personel screen or battle map) and the GPU fan turns berserk (GF7900GT 256Mo, it heats even more than for Oblivion). The first two maps were sluggish, as well as all screens involving soldiers model, and then everything went fine after maybe 30-40 minutes of play. No explanation about this, I didn't change anything.

NB:The black texture map bug has been solved by removing the UFO directory in Application Data.

I'll try tonight to see if this bug repeats itself and I'll tell you more about it.

Malick

[Dim]

I don't know if it will be of any help.

I sometimes encounter the same issue. I go to the video options, switch the screen definition to a lower and back to my screen optimal definition (clicking on the little magnifying glass after each change) and everything works fine after that.

[Kaerius]

Also, and this is the weirdest one, it chugs during team creation in multiplayer. But only on the primary weapon tab(it lags much less on secondary weapons, and not at all on misc or armor.)

[Zenerka]

I would like to ask you to perform additional testing:
1) Deinstall the game.
2) Install it again.
3) Before you run, go to base/ directory
4) Unpack every pk3 file you find there (basicaly it is renamed zip)
5) remove pk3 files after unpacking
6) run the game.

Does that help? If yes - we would know what causes this.

[Cougar_DK]

Hi, I've just tried what you suggested and its still VERY slow. I'm on the farm08d map.

My pc:
AMD XP4400, 2x7800 in SLI, 2G of RAM and X-Fire FPS sound card.

Have the same symptons as the rest, i.e. when there is 3d models on the screen I'm down to 1-3 fps and the mouse get very hard to control.

Cheers
Mark

Ps. here is my DxDiag if you can use it for something: http://www.twins4ever.dk/files/DxDiag.txt

[MeatwaD]

I too am having the same probelms, but i did notice somthing.  When i try to run it on my new Dual Core machine, it slows down as described before.  But i loaded it up on my old computer with the old style cpu (non-dual core) it runs beautifully on even the highest settings.  could this have somthing to do with Dual Core machines, as i noticed that all the ones that seem to be having these probelms in this thread are all dual core cpu's.

[Kaerius]

The problem persists even if I only give the game access to one core(running it like it was single core...)

And yeah it randomly goes on and off... anyway I'm currently running S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl on maxed settings... and the highest fps I've ever seen in UFO:AI is about 60 fps... it's like it doesn't use my graphics card at all.

[Alienshooter]

I have the same problem, when the soldiers are on-screen, then the fps drop to pretty well unplayable rates. When I scroll over to where no-one is, then it speeds up just fine. I am running Vista, and have a Core 2 duo E6600, with a Geforce 7950 512MB. If one or maybe 2 soldiers are on the screen, then it is playable, but when they are all on, as in when they land. then the fps are totally unbearable.

[MeatwaD]

Well, ive tried it on three computers and succes on all three accounts.  Ive found that if you go into your Buy/Sell menu and sell and then buy back all you "Primary" wepons.  In onther words, just start at the top of the wepons listing, for me assault rifles are at the top.  If you have 5 on hand, sell them, and then you can imidietly buy the 5 back.  Repeat this will all your primary weapons, dont have to mess with ammo ar anything else, just the wepons.  So far this has gotten rid of any lag, both in the arming menu and during the missions.  Really not sure why this works, but so far it does.

[Malick]

That's "interesting" MeatwaD... I wonder how you found this out. Anyway, I'll try this trick when I get home.

Is it because the primary weapons model are wrongly loaded in video memory ? I noticed that the soldier arming screen (in aircraft menu) lags like hell only for primary weapons, not for secondary/misc/armor. Seems like a weapon in particular causes lag. Didn't have time to find out which one exactly.

How many polys in each weapon, BTW ? I don't really believe this could come from this, because other demanding games (e.g. Oblivion, Armed Assault, STALKER, FEAR) seem to work fine for most of us.

Malick