POLL: How many frames per second do you play with?

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i find it rather amusing, how much effort the devs put into creating nice looking shadows and reflective water, but in the end, almost everyone has them disabled because they totally kill performance (unless you have a really good computer)

the devs have also disabled metallic reflections in 1.03, but it's ok, i prefer 10fps more

i think they've made quite a few poor design decisions for this game

 

Hmm... I get a frame rate of 20-60 @ 16x12 @ max settings sans water, shadows and mip mapping(I think it looks like crap anyway) I must have the most powerful PC here (at least so far...) Never had the most powerful PC in a forum before. The shadows are way cool, but we're just going to wait until someone cooks up a better card than the 8800.

 

@Faraz: I have a Packard-Bell PC, 3Ghz Pentium 4 plus 1G RAM, NVidia 5700 with 128M, latest drivers. Turned all advanced graphics off as per the various lists in this forum. Still stuttering, can't even pan the camera smoothly or accurately. Not playable in this state.

 

Your video card is pretty uh...bad. That's your bottleneck right there...

 

actually, the problem with stuttering has nothing to do with a video card.. or a cpu

what is the problem is, the people buy a 4GHZ CPU, 8800 GTX video and 4GB of ram, but the sound card is guess what? a C-MEDIA or REALTEK AC97 onboard audio chip, which simply can't run the latest games properly

these are often the source of lags and frustration for many players, even those with the best computer

the solution is simply, to buy a proper sound card to go with the rest of the system (something/ANYTHING from creative lab will be 10x better than the abovementioned stuff...)

 

It's true I play in 1024*768 only, but I get 40+ fps even with my AC97. It's just that EAX isn't for me, hehe. If I were to use EAX2, I think the framerate would drop.

 

well i don't know about other games, but oblivion sure is heavy when it comes to sound

i can tell that at least half of all the problems over at the bethsoft's tech forum are directly related to a bad sound card

i don't know why some people have more and others less problem with onboard sound, but the problem is definitely there somewhere

it's just something to look at for people who have good computers and bad performance in games; a dedicated sound board isn't that expensive anyway

 

[font style='color: #FF0000']WARNING: FANBOY ALERT![/font]

What are you talking about? C-Media makes some of the best audio chips in the business. I have one, costed 200$ and is light years ahead of CL X-Fi sound quality wise. Of course, it lacks OAL and a few other proprietary stuff but you can't beat xmeridians raw sound quality, not without hardcore audiophile equipment anyway.

Besides that, I've heard that having a dedicated sound card is actually worse because it uses more CPU cycles than builtin. I forget the exact rationale but it had something to do with the PCI bus fighting for resources with the AGP bus... and builtin doesn't have that issue... maybe I'm wrong here... I dunno...

Then how come I'm the only one who voted 30+?

 

I voted before getting that high. I think I voted before upgrading CPU, the GFX card and doubling my RAM (plus entering Dual Channel mode).

Yep, that issue exists with some systems. It may lead to awful crackling. PCI latency is probably the problem. Note that PCI-E seems to be immune as it is immune to the PCI latency setting, meaning you should be able to dodge the bad stuff with a PCI-E card. In theory.

 

maybe so but they also make some of the worst...

hah this can't be right because then all soundcard makers would have been out of business already

onboard chips usually don't do hardware acceleration (there are exceptions, such as soundstorm chips on nforce boards), which means most of the work is done by the CPU, slowing everything down
and did i mention driver support?

anyway, this sound card debate is getting useless.. but the next time i see someone posting a [insert game name] runs crappy one his superb new pc, i'm going to ...

 

All I can add at this stage is that I have a system that conforms to the game spec and a graphics card that is listed as 'supported'. So I should not be getting performance problems. Reading all this techo stuff suggests that this game requires an advanced knowledge of PC jiggery-pokery - and that is something that should not be necessary with a commercial game release. Either this game should be marketed 'for techies only' or it should be fixed.

 

The bottom line is that no matter what kind of sound card you have it's not going to affect frame rate. Maybe you might get 1 extra FPS every trillionth clock cycle or something, but it's not so much a deal that someone's low frame rate is simply due to onboard sound. If sound is causing issues it's due to incorrectly installed drivers or
something along those lines.

I did a little experiment a few years ago with my old 370 based system. I ran a few benchmarks and tested FPS on a few games with and without my santa cruz sound and I didn't notice any difference.

 

Yep. That game won't normally give a good framerate if you don't tinker with it. Besides, the autodetect function is inaccurate. Those are lucky who know what settings to change and where.

 

so er... why do you think all gaming tests are always being done without a sound card (or with sound disabled) ?

sound definitely does make an impact on overall game performance, up to 10%, depending on sound chipset and the rest of the hardware being used

in a cpu intensive game such as Oblivion, NWN2 and many others, this can be a problem seeing onboard audio chips eat up cpu cycles as well, creating a possible weak spot

then there is the question, how a sound card is able to handle multiple sounds simultaneously; this has been known to cause massive lag in Oblivion, particularly with four-legged creatures such as wolves, bears

i do not know if the same issue(s) can be found in NWN 2 however

 

I have most of the time over 20fps, but have to use 800x600 resolution (or stop playing) when it unexplainably changes to 5-14fps.

Do we really want to see every square centimeter in the characters's undetailed faces? Couldn't they just have made a smooth game with BG graphics?

EDIT: I have 1 GB RAM2, 4GHz and Radeon X550-CRAP. 1024*768 resolution and medium settings.

 

Trellheim, I got more on Celeron 2.4 GHz with 512 MB DDR1 RAM and a GF FX5900XT. You should be getting better framerates, I think.

As for onboard sound, would I gain anything from buying a fifteen buck SB Live or something like that over the AC97 chip I have?

 

depends on what kind of AC97 chip you have (ac97 is just a specification, kindof like what opengl is for video cards)

of course, a SB would have been an improvement, but if you are satisfied with sound quality and have no performance issues, don't bother

 

No idea what exactly it is, like numbers or anything, it just says Realtek AC'97 Audio and there's one driver for all that stuff.

No issues, I think, quality was better on the Live I previously own (gave it away before getting new compy because they said the integrated stuff would be better, newer, whatever).