Does anybody remember Highlander? In that movie when an immortal took the head of another immortal they experienced what was called "The Quickening" as they absorbed the knowledge and experiences gathered by the dead immortal.
Dawn of War II has had a similar impact on my computer. Only by similar I mean opposite. It's not The Quickening, it's The Slowering. And rather than absorbing knowledge and wisdom, I'm spouting profanity and curses.
I think it might be my HDD. It might be something else with my computer. It could be the game. All I know is, I've played 3 missions in single player and 4 missions in co-op and now I can't really do much else. I either hang on the opening animations, or the menu animation gets sloppy and choppy and the game doesn't respond well.
It's...infuriating.
The single player is a blast, but co-op is so much fun. Instead of being in charge of all the units the co-op splits the units between the 2 players. So we're having fun, and we've been kicking butt...only now it's my butt that's being kicked, and I don't like it.
I've lowered my graphics settings turning off physics, anti-aliasing, and post-processing. I've done as much HDD maintenance as I can think of defragging and checking my HDD partitions. I've even upped my pagefile size. But the game is choppy, and my CPU has both cores maxed out when DoW II is running.
I'm running a 2.4GHz dual core AMD processor with 2GB of memory and a nVidia Geforce 9600 video card wtih 512MB of video memory. Windows XP is my operating system, and I have the latest DirectX 9 install and drivers.
If I can't get this fixed I'm afraid my love affair with the Dawn of War series will be destroyed, and it's through Dawn of War that I got into Warhammer 40,000 in the first place. Anybody have any suggestions?
You shouldn't be having those kind of problems with that system. I'm running the same video gen card (1G version, but via IGP) and same memory, but on a P4 3.2 hyper-thread system and not experiencing many difficulties. But I'm also a sysadmin and have tweaked the heck out of that box...
ReplyDeleteAre there any disk (or other) errors popping up in your system error log? (Right click My Computer, select Manage, open Event Viewer, open System, look for big red Xs.)
If that and a physical check (chkdsk) are running clean, as well as the drives being defragged... unless it is a cabling issue it likely isn't a problem with the HDD. I'd be more inclined to start looking at the memory and motherboard for usage and settings.
You said the CPUs are maxing out... increasing the page file's unlikely to help. However, what's your commit charge looking like? DoW2's a huge memory hog; it could be that there's so much other stuff running that it's trying to dump too much over to your pagefile and clogging the CPUs. All too often I find performance issues crop up because of tons of useless services being loaded into the background. (iTunes, AppleUpdate, SophosAutoUpdate, etc.) I have a batch file on my desktop that shuts down all of those when I'm looking to do gaming. (My boot commit charge is 380M, my gaming is 112 before the game loads.)
Also, it's worth going into your BIOS at boot and checking out the settings there. Check to see if your memory is actually set to the correct timing and other things like that. It'll require a bit of reading and research but the results are typically worth it.
Check out http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html . It has a bunch of good tips on optimization and tools.
Cheers and hope that helps...
Thanks for the ideas. I'm going to test some of those out so I can try to boost some settings back up to where I want them. I did get things to work so I'm pleased to be back into the game. It's so much fun it almost hurt to know I wasn't able to play it even though it was installed.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhoops! Sorry, I was beating a dead horse there for a moment. I don't know what came over me! =D
ReplyDelete