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quote:
Originally posted by Sandeu:
I use to only get about 30fps in space and 5fps on the planet. I was reading this thread and mucked around abit, I now get 70-80 fps in space and 15-20 fps on the planet, how did I do this, I turned off Hardware acceleration on my Audigy 2 sound card, all the way off, and put the -x1 command on the UC short cut. I'm curious, give this a try, maybe it's just an Audigy 2 thing.
There is definitely something fishy going on with the Audigy cards. I have an Audigy2 ZS card in one of my machines. If you just go with the drivers that come on the CD-ROM, everything is fine. But if you make the mistake of applying ANY of the updates (e.g. the EAX4) on their site, you will lose around 20+ fps in ALL games; including UC. I actually had to uninstall the card*; clean the drivers out using Driver Cleaner (while still in Safe Mode) and re-installed from scratch using the drivers that came on the CD-ROM. I have not applied ANY updates since.
* Here's how
- Download and install (1) Driver Cleaner (2) Startup Control Panel applet (unless
you have something that does similar. - Click START / RUN / Type MSCONFIG and press ENTER.
- Insert a check to the left of SELECTIVE STARTUP and deselect 'LOAD
STARTUP ITEMS'. - Select the SERVICES tab and select HIDE ALL MICROSOFT SERVICES.
- Uncheck all results and click OK.
- Click OK and reboot when prompted.
- Reboot your computer and enter SAFE MODE by tapping F8 a few times
or by holding the SHIFT key while rebooting. - Select SAFE MODE from the menu
- Say YES to the SAFE MODE prompt; then insert the sound card's installation
CD and exit out of the installer - Click START / RUN and type "X:AUDIODRIVERSCTZAPXX.EXE into the OPEN field
(REPLACE X WITH THE APPLICABLE CD-ROM DRIVE LETTER). - Click OK.
- When the CREATIVE DRIVER UPDATE UTILITY opens, select DRIVER UNINSTALLATION under
UPDATE OPTION. If two out of the three options are disabled or greyed out under
DRIVER TYPE, click OK. Otherwise, select one of the options and click OK. Once complete,
repeat steps 9-13 again, selecting the other driver option(s). You will then be prompted to
reboot. DO NOT REBOOT!! - Click START / SETTINGS / CONTROL PANEL / ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS.
- Remove all Creative SB Audigy 2 programs. Look in list of programs beginning with
the letter C to see the "Creative" entries. Then scroll the list to those beginning with
the letter S to see the "SoundBlaster" entries. DO NOT REBOOT!! - When done, run Driver Cleaner and select CREATIVE AUDIO from the drop-down list; then
click on CLEAN. Repeat for CREATIVE AUDIO LITE and repeat. When done, close out of Driver
Cleaner - Go back to STEP #2 and access MSCONFIG then choose NORMAL STARTUP. Choose APPLY and
then exit. DO NOT REBOOT!! - Go to CONTROL PANEL and run the StartUp control panel program. Check each tab for
a Creative labs entry (e.g. Audigy, Mediasource etc), then right click on each entry and delete it. They are CTHelper, CTSysVol, CTFmon.exe (if you see this one), SBDrvDet and Creative MediaSource. There may be others, depending on what your installed when you first installed the card. - Now reboot as normal
- The Audigy 2 will be auto detected. Cancel the ADD NEW HARDWARE WIZARD when prompted.
- Insert your Audigy2 CD-ROM into your drive.
- Click START / RUN and type "X:CTRUNSTART.EXE into the OPEN field (REPLACE X WITH THE
APPLICABLE CD-ROM DRIVE LETTER). - Reboot as normal
- Calibrate your speakers etc etc. At this point, the choice is yours to go and install
the latest driver updates; or not.
You will now be back at the default Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, DR release 1.82.0 level as identified by Creative Software AutoUpdate which you can later run to see what they recommend that you install. If you install the 13.7MB EAX 4.0 ADVANCED HD Driver Update for Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2/Audigy 2 ZS, you're probably back at square one.
You might want to profile your system (e.g. using Fraps, 3DMark 2005 or similar) with the clean driver install and after installing the EAX 4.0 update above - if you do in fact install it. When I profiled it, with the default drivers, UC would perform @ 90fps in 1024x768. With the EAX4 drivers installed, it dropped down to 64fps using the same test conditions.
EDIT:
There definitely is something fishy going on with that EAX4 drive update and I am currently awaiting an answer from my Creative dev support.
[ 02-10-2005, 08:36 AM: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]
