[Its-Just-Me]

Hey,

Yesterday I downloaded and installed America's Army (www.americasarmy.com) on a recommendation from a friend. I thought at first that my system would have no trouble playing it, as even though my GPU is a terrible low-budget thing (upgrading to a 9800 GTX+ 1GB ASAP, but could still take ages), the game didn't look that graphically intensive.

My system specs are:

Intel Pentium Dual Core 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM
Inno3D GeForce 9500 GT 1GB

The reqirements for the game are:

3-D graphics card with 128 MB memory and support for hardware transformation and lighting
2.4 GHz processor or equivalent
512 MB RAM

I'm sure my CPU is fine since it's dual core, and the requirements don't mention anything about multi-cores, and the RAM is fine, but it's the GPU that is really getting at me. On paper, my card (as bad as it is) completely surpasses the requirements, but in game, it's another story.

I have set the game so that all of the graphics options are at their lowest setting, and I have set the lowest resolution, and I've even tried running the game in windowed mode. But even in the smallest levels I experience extremely poor FPS rates, when looking in a direction with little objects and characters, I can achieve FPS rates of around 40. However, as soon as I face an area where there are more then 3-5 people, and a decent collection of world objects, my FPS can drop right down to just below 10, and sometimes it hovers around 20. I really can't get my head around why this game performs so badly. I can play Far Cry 2 in a higher resolution with everything set to medium, with one or two options set to high, and I achieve FPS rates of around 40, and the game keeps a decent rate and remains smooth 95% of the time.

I have also experienced this in another game I installed recently - the original Dawn of War which was given to me by a friend. I have to play it in the lowest settings (although I keep it in 1280x1024 resolution) because when scrolling the camera, I get terrible camera stuttering, though all the action stays smooth throughout. I did put this down to it being such an old game (6 years) running on Vista, but I thought I'd mention it here as well. The GPU requirements for Dawn of War: GeForce 3 with 64MB video RAM.

[.Jamie]

Have you tried compatibility mode? The current version was made for DX9.

[Its-Just-Me]

I ran the game in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and there is a definite improvement. I've just been getting 40-50 FPS in the lesser populated areas of the screen, and it goes down to around 30 when looking at a lot of characters. There are still points on the map where it'll go down to just above 20 FPS, but compared to the 8-12 FPS I was getting in these areas before, it's a much more playable improvement. Thank you.

Still though, I'm playing it in the absolute lowest settings, and those rates are still low for the visual quality I'm getting from the game. If you or anyone else has any suggestions I'll be very greatful to hear them. I'd like to be able to up the settings a bit if I am to play online, since I'll be able to distinguish distant objects better if I can raise the LOD/resolution.

[Semper.Paratus]

Looks like your graphics card is too powerful for old games.

Perhaps your card only support DX10 and above, not the DX9 and below. So if you have got games compatible with DX9 and below, it will not run well on your nVidia card.

(I am not quite sure if this is the issue, I am simply assuming.)

[.William]

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. DX10 should be fully backwards compatible with older games, so it's more then likely an issue with Vista.

Plus, AA should be perfectly playable on his spec machine, but it's clearly not. Even in compatibility mode.

[Its-Just-Me]

I think the issue with Dawn of War is Vista. It was made in 2004, when XP was still the way to go. One of the many changes MS made in Vista is probably conflicting with the game.

Quote

Plus, AA should be perfectly playable on his spec machine, but it's clearly not. Even in compatibility mode.

That is what's got me so confused. My experience running more powerful games doesn't match up with the much less powerful AA. If I got these sort of FPS rates in AA then surely I shouldn't be able to play Far Cry 2 on such a level, and Crysis shouldn't even run.

EDIT: I just went on AA and upped the settings. I turned the resolution up, and turned mostly everything on, and set all the detail settings to normal, except character shadows. It actually didn't make a different to my FPS. I got the same FPS with everything on and set to normal and in 1024x760 resolution as I did with everything off and at it's lowest in 800x600 resolution. Odd.

I've been testing it on just one training level, but when facing a certain direction my FPS always goes down to around 25, which is quite annoying, but playable.

This post has been edited by Its-Just-Me: 26 April 2009 - 07:56 AM

[Semper.Paratus]

This is very odd. What about re-installing your graphics drivers? Have you tried that yet? Who knows, it might work.

[.Jamie]

Check on this site and see how well it says it should be running on your computer.

Also, I believe they are about to release a new version in the near future which should be fully compatible with DX10. If you can't get things sorted for now, you might have to wait until that is released.

These are the minimum and recommended specs for AA3 when it's released:

Operating System (OS)


* Microsoft Windows XP (with Service Pack 2)
* Microsoft Windows Vista

Processor (CPU)


* 3.0+ GHz Single Core CPU (Minimum)
* 2.4+ GHz Dual/Quad Core CPU (Recommended)

Memory (RAM)


* 1GB RAM (Minimum)
* 2GB RAM (Recommended)

Video Card


* Direct X 9.0c compliant, Shader 3.0 enabled video card with 256MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better) (Minimum)
* Direct X 9.0c compliant, Shader 3.0 enabled video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA 7950 or better/ATI X1950 or better) (Recommended)

Sound Card


* Direct X 9.0c compliant sound card (Minimum)
* Creative EAX 4.0 compliant sound card (Audigy 2, X-Fi series) (Recommended)

Hard Drive Space


* 5GB free hard drive space

Network


* Broadband Internet Connection

DVD-ROM


* 4x DVD-ROM (Disc Copies Only)