game running slow

[Relztrah]

I have an old Dell Dimension 2400, 2.2 Ghz Celeron processor with 1GB of RAM and the GeForce FX 5500 video card. Not a machine for recent games, but it runs the old FPS games (Half-Life, Far Cry, NOLF and the old Tom Clancy games) which is all I play.

I'm about half way through Splinter Cell Chaos Theory which has been running fine but for some reason it's getting sluggish. The video is jerky, the mouse movements are unresponsive and scenes take longer than normal to load. What's going on? I was playing this game just fine a week ago on this same machine and I've not made any changes to the settings. In fact, there is very little you can do with the video settings on this game.

[jlreich]

Can you load the game to an earlier point that played well and see if it still plays well. Are other games still playing the same?

Is it possible that the game is just at a point that is more resource intensive and therefor slowing the system down?

[Relztrah]

Can you load the game to an earlier point that played well and see if it still plays well. Are other games still playing the same?

Load an earlier mission??? And lose all the progress I've made thus far!!! I'll consider that a last resort. I'm not currently playing any other games since I'm one of those gamers who finishes one game before installing another one. But the last game I played didn't get sluggish in the middle.


Is it possible that the game is just at a point that is more resource intensive and therefor slowing the system down??

My son is of the same mind that the further into a game you get, the more resources it requires to run. This doesn't really make sense to me, but nothing else explains why it's all of a sudden running slowly. So maybe this in fact is the reason although I've never known it to happen with any other game before Chaos Theory.

Thanks for your reply.

[saphalline]

Is it possible that the game is just at a point that is more resource intensive and therefor slowing the system down?
My son is of the same mind that the further into a game you get, the more resources it requires to run.A misconception of modern games (that apparently persists to this day :p) that stems from the days of yore... like 15+ years ago!

It is true that RPG saved games have a tendency to store state data that differs from the original "null state" world data (thus increasing in size as the player progresses) but it is not true that "more resources" in general are required as a player progresses through a game. You could construe this in terms of memory leaks, wherein a game continuously uses more RAM as a session progresses, but that is as far as this could go. Any decent game made within the last 15 years only requires more resources when the rendering scene space requires it. Graphics are the only way to slow down a game these days, assuming the system running it meets the recommended requirements.

But since these games were working before, there's something else at work. Something more sinister...

What has changed lately? Just about everything can affect gaming performance because it stretches your system to its limits! There may in fact be a system-wide problem that you don't actually notice until you fire up Chaos Theory. An infection? Hardware failure? Recent Windows update? Unfortunately, you'll have to check everything!

[jlreich]

Any decent game made within the last 15 years only requires more resources when the rendering scene space requires it.
That's what I meant actually. Wondering that it may just be a more intense scene. I have the game in question but never really got around to playing it, so I thought it could possibly be a scene that just required more juice and chocked the system.

[saphalline]

Single entities of gaming don't usually do that. Just for the purposes of "wow'ing" the player, games tend to push all their graphical goodness as soon as possible (unless certain effects detract from the story line). I know Chaos Theory does, at the very least. There is certainly nothing in the later stages of the game that would account for the disparity of performance described here.

However, when it comes to expansions, all bets are off!! Expansions are much more likely to up the ante in the graphical department. I've even seen expansions that significantly increase the min req's! :eek: Not a good idea! ;)

For instance, World of Warcraft. This game runs on an aging graphics engine as it is. The original game content is DX7, with TnL thrown in for good measure. :rolleyes: Not too spectacular by any means! But the expansion laid down some truly intense effects! It can't make up for the lack of SM 3.0, but it looks as good as a DX8 game now! But this all comes at a price... Going to the areas that are added by the expansion (Outlands) incurs a hefty 20-30% performance drop! :eek: The min req's for the game haven't changed, but clearly gamers can no longer rely on such metrics. Outlands has killed a few of the older systems out there.

All bets are off when it comes to added content...

[Relztrah]

What has changed lately? Just about everything can affect gaming performance because it stretches your system to its limits! There may in fact be a system-wide problem that you don't actually notice until you fire up Chaos Theory. An infection? Hardware failure? Recent Windows update? Unfortunately, you'll have to check everything!

I'm reasonably confident that I don't have an infection or hardware failure, but I did download and install SP3. Would that slow down my system when playing a game?

It's not really an issue any more because I uninstalled the game. My son blew his first summer paycheck on a 360 anyway, so when I feel the need to kill somebody, I'll fire up the 360. I'll have to learn how to use the controller all over again.

[mjc]

Yes, it is possible for a service pack to slow down a game...but for most the opposite was the case, SP3 added some speed to the system. It's possible that reinstalling the game now, after SP3, could return it to normal...I've seen stranger things happen after MS updates.

[saphalline]

SP3 contains every single previous M$ update in addition to some new security, network, and interoperability features. While SP3 in and of itself does not affect base functionality of WinXP as an OS, have you considered the possibility that it updated something else?

You might want to make the runs through the software support structure of Windows gaming. Update your DirectX (using the end-user off-line version), then all your drivers. Be sure to reboot between each one of those.