Advices on improving my system

[stownin]

Hi,
I am currently running Vanguard on an AMD 3500 single procesor with 256MB VRAM on a Radeon 9800GT and 1 GB of ram.

My average frame rate is around 30 and it drops down to less than 10 once I reach places with more than 10 players running around.

I am not too sure what kinda frame rate you guys are getting, but to me this seems unplayable at times.

2 questions:

1) So I am thinking of getting another 1 GB of RAM. Do you guys think this will make a big difference?

2) Also, I noticed the sound options available to me are Generic software/Generic Hardware. Is it the same for you guys? My sound card is integrated on board. ASUS motherboard. And I did notice that if I turn off the sound. there is a significant improvement in gameplay. So should I get an external sound card and stick it on my motherboard? Or graphics have nothing to do with sound and I should just leave it as it is?


Suggestions please
Stownin

[Lightning]

1: An extra gig of ram should help with hitching - though since the 17/1 patch I am suffering from extreme hitching and so are quite a few others.
2: Sound still hits your performance hard - I recently went over to hardware sound as part of a system refresh and am unsure as to whether or not it made an appreciable difference. Some people do swear by it though.

[Ryngard]

I have a P4 3.0g, 2gig RAM, and a 512 PCIe card. I have a huge empty harddrive and its tweaked pretty well. I keep my system running well and the game "averages" 10-15 FPS in cities (and it tanks anywhere from 1 FPS to 5 FPS for a second before coming back). Outside Tanvu its better... averaging 20-30 FPS.

I tried all the tweaks on Silky Venom's forums and the ONLY one that helped was totally Disabling Sound. It gave me 5-10 FPS so now I average 20 in town and 30 outside (and sometimes its better and sometimes worse). But I'm left with no sound.

My wife's system is identical but with only 1 gig ram and she has the same FPS roughly so its not making much difference for us (but by all means buy it, its worth the investment).

My brother and nephew (two different homes) have better systems (3.4s with higher graded RAM and cards) and they have the same or worse issues.

I THINK that the current FPS issue is server load problems. Pre-Beta 5 I had excellent FPS in cities. After Beta 5 started I droped 10-15 FPS. I think it'll get better when they optimize the game a bit more.

OR it could be our ISP... Comcast/Adelphia sucks. I might upgrade to the "Higher" speed version... might help.

[XeroKill]

AMD64 X2 4400+ Dual Core 2.21GHz
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Mobo
2x nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256Mb in SLI
2GB Corsair RAM
On board ASUS 5.1 Sound

I am running an average of 45 - 60 FPS out in the open and dropping as low as 25 FPS in town areas. If you set the sound option to Hardware it should give a little performance but I am in the same boat for sound. If I turn off my sound I do get a decent performance boost, especially in town. I am pretty sure getting a sound card would help to minimize this as well as increase sound quality. Right now it is decent with my MoBos sound, but I know a nice Sound Blaster would do a lot better. Definitely get the RAM. I am even thinking of bumping mine up to 4GB of RAM after my tax return comes in. Unfortunately neither dual core CPUs or SLI GFX cards are being supported, so perhaps if they add in the architecture it will help me out later on, but right now the game is doing fine for me. The only real boggle I have is the same hitching every one sees when entering highly populated areas.

[VereAthor]

C2D 2.4 GHz
2 GB RAM
GF 8800GTS

Runs on High quality (1280x1024) with 50-70 FPS (vanguard does ignore vsync?) and in cities 30-40 FPS. Have to do the "caching spins" nonetheless to prevent the system from hitching.

I have never relied on onboard sound, so can't really say how much impact this has on performance, but others talk about 5-10% average. Upgrading to 2 GB of RAM is something I would absolutely recommend.

But 4 GB will produce more problems than solve them, unless you are running a Windows XP 64 Edition or Vista 64. Windows XP 32-bit is not able to address more than 2048 MB of RAM without some trickery (you will have effectively about 2.7 GB available if you have 4GB) and it is known to produce system instabilities on the 32bit Win XP.

[Lightning]

Originally Posted by VereAthor

vanguard does ignore vsync?

You can enable vsync in the vgclient.ini - I forget the exact line but it has "sync" in it and defaults to False.

[Ryngard]

Originally Posted by VereAthor

C2D 2.4 GHz
2 GB RAM
GF 8800GTS

Runs on High quality (1280x1024) with 50-70 FPS (vanguard does ignore vsync?) and in cities 30-40 FPS. Have to do the "caching spins" nonetheless to prevent the system from hitching.

See, something is wrong here. My system (by numbers) is higher than yours (lets say that at worst if you have better quality components that we equal). You are getting at least 20 FPS in both scenarios better than I am.

I THINK that the issue is a server problem that affects random people. I just don't get it...

[stownin]

Thanks for the reply guys. I guess I will just format get another gig of RAM and format my PC right before the main game comes.
*Pray for better FPS on release* :?

[VereAthor]

@Ryngard

The P4 is much slower than the Core 2 Duo, even if the Core frequency is higher. For comparison, see http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/...64/page12.html

In your above post you don't state what GPU you have in your system, so I can't compare that, but taking only the CPUs into account, no surprise my system yields more FPS. Built that system 6 weeks ago, had enough of my 5 year old AMD system. The Core2duo is hell of a machine.

EDIT: This is not meant as a "mine is better than yours" post. Just analyzing the discrepancies. :wink:

[Ryngard]

I have a Pentium D 3.0 - Still call everything P4 from habit. Still though, I should do better than that!