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CTD and FPS issues on Acer Aspire 5021 notebook


reality273
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Greetings and sorry for the very long post.

First, if this the wrong location for posting I apologize and delete or move as appropriate.

Second, excellent game(s).Been a long time since I was this excited about a game.

Which leads me to the problem at hand:

Very low FPS when planet side and irregular CTD`s.

Especially when using any of the Instant Action scenarios for marines.

Some of them crash almost just as soon as they are finished loading and the ones that do not crash instantly will do after sometime. When starting a roam game as any type of ground based carer the works a little better, still very low frame rate and it takes a while before it crashes.

In space however everything works just fine.Not a single problem.

Now I have been trying to fix this for a whole week now and I`ve tried all I could possibly think of:

Re-installing, with or without the latest patch (yes the correct one for my d2d version, using both the updater and manually downloading it and installing)

Defragmention using both the built in windows version and Perfect Disc 7.0

Changing the windows swap file, all possible settings.

The latest drivers for both the onboard sound and my ATI X700 graphics card. Have also tried a bunch of different drivers for them (Omega etc etc)

The throttling of the CPU is disabled, have checked using different third party software as AMD Dash board, SISOFT Sandra etc etc. Its running at full speed, 1,6GHz.

Tweaked windows as much as possible, only most basic and necessary things running and on autostart. Also I just did a fresh install of XP

Tried all in-game options on/off and different resolutions.Sound on/off etc.

Tried all settings for the sound acceleration.

Updated the bios to latest version.

To just name a few of the things I`ve tried...

Now the strange part is that no matter what I change or do the performance and FPS remain exactly the same.

I'm not expecting 600+ frames per second, just enough to make it playable.25-30 would do just fine.

What get using FRAPS is anything between 1 and 60.

Also there seems to be a lot of swapping going on when planet side, stutters horribly.

Also, the CPU load is 100% just in the main game menu. Both when in full screen(maybe not an accurate reading) and in window mode.

So...

Is the notebook not up to the challenge of running UCG or is there something weird going on?

Slow hard drive, not enough RAM or is an AMD Turion ML-28 not fast enough?

I`ve also tried the old demo for UC with about the same results, the demo runs a little faster.

But the UCAWA demo(the second one) runs with acceptable performance...is this because of the things disabled in the demo or is it representative of the full game performance?

If so, I`d gladly buy that instead.

Anything useful would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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quote:

Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

Your notebook does not meet with the minimum requirements for the game.

Minimum Requirements

┬ÀWindows 98SE/ME/2000/XP (with all service packs)

┬À DirectX 9.0c or higher

┬À Pentium III 1Ghz or equivalent AMDprocessor

┬À 256MB RAM

┬À 64MB video card with vertex shader 1.1 or higher

┬À DirectSound compatible sound card

┬À CDROM or DVD-ROM

┬À Mouse

Recommended Requirements

┬À Windows 2000/XP (with all service packs)

┬À Pentium IV 1.7Ghz or equivalent AMD processor

┬À 512MB RAM

┬À 128MB video card with pixel & vertex shader 1.1 or higher

┬À Joystick

Notebook specs:

(From Acer site)

AMD® Turion®64 ML28 processor 1,6GHz, Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition, 15,4" WXGA ACB, 80GB, 512MB (2x256), DVD-RW Dual DL, ATi Mobility X700 128MB, Gbe+Wlan b/g, 6-i-Card reader, Acer Arcade

Am I missing something here?

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Thats what I was starting to suspect but didn't want to realize ...guess I'll try to find a copy of BCMG since I don't care much for joysticks.

But anyway thanks for your time and the fast response, its not every day you get answers from the lead developer in just a few hours. That type of dedication is impressive to say the least.

Keep up the good work.

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Why don't you download the freeware copy of BCM first, before going out and spending money on BCMG? Check our downloads page for the links to it. At least then you will know how it performs. If it does well on your laptop, so will BCMG, since they use the same engine.

btw, the reason you will get crashes on the planet is if that card does not support pixel shaders. Since it is a laptop chipset paired with a crappy CPU, it is highly unlikely that it has the required pixel shader.

Also, the demos are vastly scaled down versions of the game, though use the same kernel.

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The freeware version of BCM is the reason I bought UCG, and it runs great so I will definitely be getting a copy of BCMG.

The ATI Mobility X700 is actually supposed to be a pretty decent card, at least for a notebook.

Haven't had a single problem with it yet and the UCAWA graphic card tester says it has both Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 1.1.

BTW, freeware releases are probably one of the best and most underused ways of promoting new games.

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My games are all CPU bound due to the AI. So, the CPU and memory really have to be up to snuff.

If you're getting slow and/or bad performance on the planet, then the problems are due to the amount of processing, since the planetary engine requires more resources than space.

Have you tried turning off all options for the planet to their lowest settings?

Note also that UCG uses character models with a LOT more polys than those used in UC. In fact, the UCG character models are based on the UCAWA versions, but with lower poly counts.

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It makes a lot of sense that the processor just isn't up to the task. Haven't noticed it before as I mostly run older games on the notebook but I checked the settings for F.E.A.R (just as example, not as a comparison) and the system dependent options are all turned off or set to minimum if you let it configure automatically, turning any one of them up results in a slide show.

The graphic card dependent options can be set to high or at least medium without any impact on performance.

Yes I have tried turning all the planet options off in UCG and as far as I can tell it makes very little if any difference. I think I have pretty much exhausted all possible solutions to improve performance, or at least the usual ones that I know of. Been trying for more then a week so at this point I'll probably just wait until I have a better rig before getting into UCG.

Yeah the character models look real nice, thats what makes it a little annoying that I can't assault a planetary base without my computer suffering as serious meltdown.

But anyway, I already found a store which still has copy┬┤s of BCMG so I'll just stick with that for now.

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