Bloodlines goes *SLOW* on "new" hardware

[Llewlyn]

Hi all dude and vampires here.

I've install vampire + official 1.2 + unofficial 5.3, then i've started a new game. My hw comprend a pentium D, mb ASUS P5B, 2 giga ram, ATI X1650 Pro.
The game goes very fluid except in some cursed areas (there are A LOT of theese areas) where it goes *terribily* slow. Sometimes if i quit and rejoin, the same area seems to have no problem.

I've defragged my machine, tryed the 8.5 catalyst and omega drivers and also to reinstall with the "TruePatch" instead of the unofficial one. Nothing. I've tryed to backup the "engines.dll" from "engines.dll.back" (as the unofficial patch documentation said) but it didnt help (i was not able to launch DllFix because it said "application not correctly initialized").

Do you know some magic formulas i can try?

Ll.

[Jhereg]

Originally Posted by Llewlyn

Hi all dude and vampires here.

I've install vampire + official 1.2 + unofficial 5.3, then i've started a new game. My hw comprend a pentium D, mb ASUS P5B, 2 giga ram, ATI X1650 Pro.
The game goes very fluid except in some cursed areas (there are A LOT of theese areas) where it goes *terribily* slow. Sometimes if i quit and rejoin, the same area seems to have no problem.

I've defragged my machine, tryed the 8.5 catalyst and omega drivers and also to reinstall with the "TruePatch" instead of the unofficial one. Nothing. I've tryed to backup the "engines.dll" from "engines.dll.back" (as the unofficial patch documentation said) but it didnt help (i was not able to launch DllFix because it said "application not correctly initialized").

Do you know some magic formulas i can try?

Ll.

Try going to options/graphics and turning off "Environmental Effects". On borderline systems (which I used to have) things like rain would absolutely destroy the fluidity of the game. If that works, then you know at least part of the problem - not enough horsepower. If that's the case, try tuning your graphics card for maximum performance instead of maximum quality, and that might make all the difference. How you do that varies from card to card and model to model, so you'll just have to go to graphics/advanced options and find out what choices you have.

[Lucita]

An ATI X1650 Pro isn't the best graphic chip to try this game. It's on the low end of graphic cards anyway. I am pretty sure you wouldn't have a problem with the next higher card an ATI X1800 Pro or XL/XT.
It isn't much better then an X600 or Radeon 9600 Pro, just another generation of chip and more geared up for Multimedia then Gaming.

I had an ATI X850 Pro and had small lags only sometimes. Now I have a Nvidia 8800 GT ( 1024 MB ) and no problems at all....

[Jhereg]

Originally Posted by Lucita

An ATI X1650 Pro isn't the best graphic chip to try this game. It's on the low end of graphic cards anyway. I am pretty sure you wouldn't have a problem with the next higher card an ATI X1800 Pro or XL/XT.
It isn't much better then an X600 or Radeon 9600 Pro, just another generation of chip and more geared up for Multimedia then Gaming.

I had an ATI X850 Pro and had small lags only sometimes. Now I have a Nvidia 8800 GT ( 1024 MB ) and no problems at all....

"Low end of graphics cards" is a wildly relative condition. I was running VTMB on far lesser cards several years ago. On an X1600, the only real improvement I got over the last generation was the freedom to go to higher quality over pure performance.

There are other concerns, though, like memory, but the configuration given doesn't seem that bad as far as memory goes, either. If tuning for performance doesn't do it, then I'd have to figure the problem was with the CPU itself. I've seen some late-model laptop cpus that were abysmally slow.

There is, however, one obvious candidate that nobody's mentioned yet. Would this by any chance be running on Vista? I have (thankfully) no direct experience with that beast yet (I refuse to move up an OS unless I can be certain there is a benefit to be gained), but I hear it's something of a system pig in it's own right. If that's the case, then maybe a search in this forum on "Vista" would turn up some useful tips.

[Lucita]

Yeah....well if you have VISTA running.....then good luck !

I wouldn't go with less then 2 GB RAM with Vista on a good day, with a memory intense game like VTM probably a bad idea...Also, wasn't there a problem with DirectX9 under Vista ( not preinstalled ) because it uses DirextX10 ?

[riotfellow]

Originally Posted by Lucita

An ATI X1650 Pro isn't the best graphic chip to try this game. It's on the low end of graphic cards anyway. I am pretty sure you wouldn't have a problem with the next higher card an ATI X1800 Pro or XL/XT.
It isn't much better then an X600 or Radeon 9600 Pro, just another generation of chip and more geared up for Multimedia then Gaming.

I had an ATI X850 Pro and had small lags only sometimes. Now I have a Nvidia 8800 GT ( 1024 MB ) and no problems at all....

I've got an X1600 chip to run this game and I run this game with a resolution of 1280x1024 and max detail settings, and I get no problems at all..

The X1650 is supposed to be an upgrade of the chip so I can't see why it should be worse.

@Llewlyn
Have you tried using an older version of drivers? I have experienced slowdowns in some games if I change to a newer version of driver and rolling back to an old one seems to do the trick sometimes.

[kcgirlgeek]

Interesting that someone mentioned Vista problems.

I'm running Vista on a Core2Duo 2.66Ghz (2 CPUs), with 4 installed gigs of RAM (I know it only presently recognizes 2914MB, so...a little over 2G), and using an nVidia 8800GT with DX10 and the game runs smooooooth as silk. HOWEVER, I know that I read SOMEWHERE that you have to run the game at 800x600 resolution for it to work with Vista. I have no idea why that is, and I'm certainly NOT a tech geek, but I kept that in the back of my mind when I read it and haven't tried running the game in any resolution outside of that yet. But I DO know that it runs great as is.

I also might add, that I too was one of the VERY very "Vista-resistant" crowd. I play a LOT of games, both new and old and getting me to switch to Vista was like pulling teeth. However, I have to honestly say....I've not had any problems with it. (/knocks on wood) So, I don't know if I'm just very lucky or what. O.o

[Jhereg]

Originally Posted by kcgirlgeek

I also might add, that I too was one of the VERY very "Vista-resistant" crowd. I play a LOT of games, both new and old and getting me to switch to Vista was like pulling teeth. However, I have to honestly say....I've not had any problems with it. (/knocks on wood) So, I don't know if I'm just very lucky or what. O.o

My vote would go with lucky. I have games that freaked because I got dual 64-bit CPUs - touch the forward key and you would slam into a wall. VTMB was very good that way - didn't seem to notice.