Improving performance

Hi

Been playing DA for a few days now, and really enjoying it

However, somewhere during mid game the game becomes really sluggish. I've been tweaking the options and that has helped, but I was wondering if there were more I could do? So far I've done this:

* disable background music
* turn down nebula density (40 -> 10)
* turn down no of stars (1500 -> 500)
* disable starfield in ship designer
* increase resolution to 1280x1024 (due to LCD)
* set video presets to Mid
* set AA to 0
* set planet detail to 30%

I have an almost 4 years old PC which doesn't help... It's a P4@2.667, 1GB RAM, FX5200 graphics card.
Short of buying a new PC, I've been wondering if getting a GeForce 6200 would help? An even better card would obviously be better, but the PSU is only 350W and it's got to be AGP, so an 6200 seemed like an (cheap) option.
How about more RAM? Of course you can never get enough RAM, but would it actually give a boost to DA - 1GB seems reasonable?

/Mikael

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Depending on the galaxy size, 1GB is bare minimum.

If you play Gigantic size you should shoot for at least 2GB of ram. I often see system memory usage in the 2.6GB range after a long game on Gigantic, especially if you have 8 or 9 civs and a lot of ships.

The slowdowns are probably a combination of both ram usage and video card, though. The 6200 might help if it has a lot more vram than the FX5200, but it is still a lower end card. If you could get a 6800GS with 256MB it would probably help a lot more. It is a very decent mid-range card, and I believe they are available in AGP - if you can find one.

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lol. I'm crazy, I have 512 ram and I play on gigantic!

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Lord Reliant

Join Date 03/2006

+39

I have an XP 1900+ w/ 1 GB of RAM and an Asus GeForce 6600 card and it plays pretty well (although I haven't played as much with DA, so I'm not as sure). I've played on Gigantic a couple of times and it did slow down near the end, but it was still playable, and I had most graphic features still on. Kudos to Stardock on this.

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increase resolution to 1280x1024 (due to LCD)

is it better to play at your monitor's native resolution, or at a lower resolution? my native is 1920x1200, but i've turned it down to 1680x1050. should i turn it back up?

also, i was just going to say, standard PC stuff like defragging your hard drive and cleaning up your registry might help a bit, if you don't do that stuff regularly, as well as disabling any background type stuff when you play.

more RAM might help, but i think the bigger issue is your RAM speed - it'll be pretty slow on a 4-year-old MB no matter what you do. but more's always better. i usually just play smaller games, not because my system's stopping me, but because of my attention span.

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PC I play on (i have 3) seems to handle DA really well..Only problem i have is when i quit playing it takes awhile for the system to recover back to the desktop..And a slight slowdown towards end game... Generally signals i have to do that dreaded REBOOT...I play gigantic almost always with 3-6 civs. All my graphics settings are on ..Full Screen ... But then i'm more into actual game play then highend graphics...

ASUS A8V MB
AMD athlon 64 3500+
1024GB Corsair XMS DDR
200GB Maxtor HD
ATI 9600PRO 256mb AGP

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Winnow out any ship designs you no longer need in the Shipbuilder.

Ships are saved in the save game file; (in addition to the ship config folder); - this can help speed up the time to shut down and load save games.

(I delete them - after making a copy of the folder containing the designs in case I want them in the future, not sure if Obsoleteing them actually removes them from the save game file.)

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This may sound obvious...But I always reboot before starting a mid to late game session. Then before actually launching the game, I kill everything out of the system tray/memory that isn't actually needed for GC II (like printer stuff/IM/Adobe Cue). A couple of them, have to be killed off the processes list actually take them out of memory. Moving from 1.6Gb free to 1.8Gb shouldn't make that much difference, but I can really tell on my system...Just have to remember to reboot the system, when I am done, if the computer is going to be used for anything else.

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