4FPS on a Via C7 computer.

[Guest par]

I originally became involved in EL on a computer that wasn't mine. I was excited to see it had extremely low requirements. Eventually I was forced to play on one of my computers and have had no luck. The requirements state a pentium 2 450mhz and has even run on tnt2 cards. While it is a very slow computer it completely blows those requirements out of the water.

 

It is a Via C7 1.2ghz which is about the equivilant of a pentium 3 800mhz-1ghz~ depending on what type of benchmark you are looking at for it. It has cn700 onboard s3 graphics and 1GB of ram. Running windows xp with all the latest drivers and updates.

 

I had the settings at 640x480 with everything I could turned off no music or sound or fancy graphics. Poor man was enabled. Around storage areas I managed 2-4fps. In wilderness with almost nothing on screen I could peak at about 10fps if I was lucky. Just to try I put in a ati pci 7000 and it was the same exact results. The cpu was at 100% constantly. I have tried both the older nov/dec windows version and the one posted on forums from january. The older one did 2fps the newer one did 4fps at storage with approximately the same amount of people around it.

 

 

Wondering if the requirements are actually realistic or have gone up drastically? Or suggestions and comments about this would be appreciated.

[Entropy]

Well, this CPU is not one of the fastest, it's meant for low power consumption. I think the problem is with the floating point unit.

The video card is not one of the best either (especially the S3).

 

As for the system requirements, yes, they did go up a little bit, but the game should be playable with a computer that is 5 years old (or equivalent).

[Guest par]

Is this a cpu heavy or video heavy game then? The fpu on the C7 is definately weak, though even if you doubled the requirements that system should still be enough.

 

Just for kicks I took the drive out and put it in my pentium m box. It has ddr2 ram, pentium m 2.1ghz and onboard gma915 graphics. The p-ms are about within 10% of the current gen intel core solos of the same clock speed. The cpu was maxed out at 640x480 poor man etc and I could only pull about 8fps at storage, 20~ out in the wilderness. Ok I know what is going to be said the gma sucks, though we are talking 640x480 no audio/music at the lowest possible settings in the wilderness no moving people and the occasional brownie.

 

Edit-

Just for comparison on how slow the via is running this with it's 3d accelleration. I ran the pentium m @ 900mhz with openbsd and the linux compatibility layer. No 3d acceleration only software rendering through mesa and it was able to pull upto 5fps.

Edited February 2, 2008 by par

[Entropy]

The game uses both the CPU and the video card, although the latest version (the CVS one) will remove some load from the CPU if the video card supports vertex programs (not sure if your S3 supports that, but I think it doesn't).

 

I know at least one person that runs the game on a TNT2 card, on some older CPU (not sure exactly what CPU), and the game works fine (about 15+ fps).

[Alia]

This comment is pretty useless, but still I'll post it:

I've managed to run the game on S3 card about a year ago (so before eye-candy was introduced).

But even then it was almost unplayable because textures mapping was absolutely wrong.

 

I expect they haven't improved their drivers severely, so it is not likely you'll run the game on S3.

 

P.S.

And it is neither CPU nor GPU demanding game (except maybe several places in game).

You can run game on older nvidia/ati cards because they have good new drivers.

 

As about 8 fps: looks like you do software rendering, so difference between 900 MHz and 2.1 GHz

processors is not big.

[Guest par]

I am not doing software rendering in Windows XP which I don't even know if that is possible under windows without the program supporting it. I correctly installed the 3d acceleration drivers (newest ones I could find) for both the S3 and Intel onboard. I just wanted to give a comparison of how slow it is running on the via. That it isn't much faster than software rendering on something slightly faster in unix. Also the graphics were a bit messed up at first with the S3 but changing a few of the settings corrected it. It seems to play normally except for the excruciating slow frame rate.

 

When I get back later to post again I will test the radeon 7000 on the intel machine and play with some other hardware then post the results. Maybe any suggestions on what I should be doing or checking to get this to work? I see skirting around the issue the Via maybe just isn't fast enough and that the requirements have really gone up that much, but on the other hand it seems something is definately wrong when it isn't work on the pentium-m system unless again the requirements really are that high now. That or as I start to think it may be something where it only wants to work with ati/nvidia cards mostly due to design.

 

I don't have a linux box on hand although I ask if that would solve the issue here.

[Guest par]

Well I did manage to get my sound for it finally working with the client update and ruin the windows installation moving it too many times between systems.

 

Best I can figure from other forums and my experience is the s3 unichrome does not implement some features accelerated for opengl causing a massive slowdown. What features EL is using that are critical to be accelerated I don't know. The 7k radeon is probably facing the same problem and is a geforce 1 not a tnt2 competitor, but was the slowest radeon ever produced except maybe the 7200le or whatever it was.

 

As for the Intel GMA that is still a bit of a mystery. I didn't get much of a chance with it except to see that whatever the issue was that cranking the cpu up made it barely playable only at low resolutions.

 

And yes I stand corrected EL will actually go into software rendering mode for Windows if you have no 3d driver installed it will automatically go into full screen 640x480 mode. Although that was not the case here.

 

Dissapointing since those are my only 2 fanless systems. I've looked, though maybe someone else knows of a pci or pcie card that does 5W or so that would accelerate it in a acceptable way. Or has any other suggestions as to what I might try besides wait until silverthorn based machines come out one day.

[Entropy]

Well, fanless systems are not really meant for 3D stuff..

If fanless is what you want, did you consider oil cooling?

[Gampa]

I don't have a linux box on hand although I ask if that would solve the issue here.

My Laptop runs on Linux and it's got Via S3 Unichrome Pro graphics too.

The drivers for linux totally suck. Using direct rendering makes the whole system lock up/freeze.

So I tried playing EL using software rendering only, which caused very low (2-3) fps of course.

 

For some time I had Windows XP on that same laptop. I had the latest Via drivers for it,

but it seemed that it only worked in software rendering mode, as I only had 1-2 fps.

Also, the were lots of displaying errors, like missing objects, flickering and such.

 

Imho, that chipset is only useful for 2D stuff :/