Curse

pinkeyflower · Apr 19, 2011, 01:43 PM // 13:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spiritz

Another shot in the dark here - i know ms have stopped support for xp and it may be possible that other graffix card makers have also stopped actual xp support and releasing vista/win 7 drivers only.So what may be "up to date " drivers for xp are not actually current drivers but older - if you follow.
I was using xp upto 2 months ago where i switched to vista and i used a nvidea 8500gt with no probs at all and even now in win7 it works fine - along with vista/win7 current drivers.

XP SP3 has extended support until April 2014 and a simple search on nVidia shows that they still release drivers for their latest graphics cards for windows XP. I would be pretty stupid to stop support for XP when it still dominates the market.

Quaker · Apr 19, 2011, 02:28 PM // 14:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benderama

is 800x600 the optimal resolution?

Optimal resolution would be the resolution that matches your monitor's 'native' resolution (LCD). Sometimes you can play at a lower rez than the native rez, but it can end up being stretched or squashed, or glitchy, and won't look as pretty.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chthon

Correct. FPS and ping have nothing to do with each other.

Not entirely correct. A high ping can mean that a game has to wait for update info, and therefore, affect the 'game' fps, resulting in choppy game play.
In GW, for example, the fps shown by the little green/yellow/red dot can be affected by bad ping. The 'game' fps is related to, but not the same as, the video card/monitor refresh rate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pinkyflower

Do you have VSync on? If you disable it you can get higher framerates but you may get some tearing.

One effect of Vsync is to limit the max fps to the refresh rate of the monitor (nominally 60Hz/fps). Unless his monitor has a 10Hz refresh rate, Vsync won't matter.

@OP - one thing you might consider, since Windows can get clogged with all sorts of junk over time, would be to back up anything you want to keep and then start over with a reformat and a clean install.

pinkeyflower · Apr 19, 2011, 02:49 PM // 14:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quaker

One effect of Vsync is to limit the max fps to the refresh rate of the monitor (nominally 60Hz/fps). Unless his monitor has a 10Hz refresh rate, Vsync won't matter.

VSync still affects framerate. When I was playing on an old computer with VSync on I could barely squeeze out 30 FPS, although I wasn't using triple buffering, but when I turned it off the framerate went up to ~60.

Taken from TweakGuides:

Quote:

There is however a more fundamental problem with enabling VSync, and that is it can significantly reduce your overall framerate, often dropping your FPS to exactly 50% of the refresh rate. This is a difficult concept to explain, but it just has to do with timing. When VSync is enabled, your graphics card becomes a slave to your monitor. If at any time your FPS falls just below your refresh rate, each frame starts taking your graphics card longer to draw than the time it takes for your monitor to refresh itself. So every 2nd refresh, your graphics card just misses completing a new whole frame in time. This means that both its primary and secondary frame buffers are filled, it has nowhere to put any new information, so it has to sit idle and wait for the next refresh to come around before it can unload its recently completed frame, and start work on a new one in the newly cleared secondary buffer. This results in exactly half the framerate of the refresh rate whenever your FPS falls below the refresh rate.

Chthon · Apr 19, 2011, 05:27 PM // 17:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quaker

Not entirely correct. A high ping can mean that a game has to wait for update info, and therefore, affect the 'game' fps, resulting in choppy game play.

Your FPS is still going to be fine. The game doesn't stop rendering frames just because it has no updates and is just redrawing the same basic frame (+ environmental stuff like clouds moving and leaves blowing and so on). Now, really bad data throughput can leave you with horrible choppy gameplay with things teleporting around and not being where they appear to be. But you are still viewing this unplayable mess at 60FPS or whatever.

More fundamental is the point that FPS problems and lag problems almost always spring from different causes. FPS problems result from a video card that is insufficient, or a bad video driver, crapware monitor software like EZTune trying to "re-drive" the video, or, rarely, a lack of system resources that's bottlenecking things before they even hit the video card. Ping problems are almost always connectivity issues on the other side of the network cable, and, on rare occasions, an issue on the local machine like a bad network driver or virus/malware/crapware that's competing for bandwidth. There's almost no overlap in the sets of potential causes between the two problems, and what overlap there is ought to arise from insufficient hardware and not be the sort of sudden-onset thing that threads are made about. So, for non-technical audiences, like OP and most other guruers, stick to the simple (perhaps oversimplified) point: ping is not relevant to FPS and vice versa. That way people stop giving you irrelevant information and focus on things that might enable you to figure out what's causing their problem.

Laylat · Apr 24, 2011, 09:28 AM // 09:28

I may have a solution for you because I had the same problem the other day. I actually was checking this thread to see if there was a solution.

I ran GW the other day and noticed the application was really slow... I mean, 10 FPS slow. My usual FPS is 60. My ping was normal. The first thing I check was, of course, if there was any other application running. I eventually ruled that out. I restarted my machine and started GW again. This time, it was at 60 FPS. However, it was slowly decreasing to 10. Puzzled, I decided to open my computer and noticed the video card fan was not turning !!!

After confirming that it was a temperature related issue, I decided to take the whole machine down to the store room. I plugged the leaf blower in the socket and blow the mother out of the pc. It's really amazing how much dust builds up in there. After convinced it was nice and clean (and looked brand new too!), I plugged it back in and ran GW. Worked fine ^.^

I spent about 2.5 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, and testing if my hypothesis was correct, and finally fixing it. However, I ended up playing for only 10 minutes that night before hitting the sack :P

Quaker · Apr 24, 2011, 03:14 PM // 15:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chthon

Now, really bad data throughput can leave you with horrible choppy gameplay with things teleporting around and not being where they appear to be. But you are still viewing this unplayable mess at 60FPS or whatever.

And that's the difference between "game fps" and "video card/monitor" fps. If you lose your internet connection while playing GW, your game essentially freezes. Your video card is still sending 60fps to the monitor, but the game has essentially zero fps. You are still rendering frames of local animations, sounds, etc. at whatever fps, but the overall "game" effect is 0 fps.
Conversely, if you turn off Vsync, your game can run at higher fps, for example, 150 fps, but your video card will still send only 60fps (or 75, or 120) to the monitor because that's the monitor's refresh rate (60, 75, 120, or w/e Hz). (Which is why there's no point in turning vsync off.)

pinkeyflower · Apr 24, 2011, 03:17 PM // 15:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quaker

Conversely, if you turn off Vsync, your game can run at higher fps, for example, 150 fps, but your video card will still send only 60fps to the monitor because that's the monitor's refresh rate. (Which is why there's no point in turning vsync off.)

It does have use if your video card is just bad to begin with and can't hit 60 FPS even without VSync on. In that case you're increasing you framerate, low as it may be, and not really going to suffer that much for it.