GeForce FX5500 good enough for WoV?

[stevevag]

Hi Guys,

 

I'm new to WoV, been playing it stand alone for about a month. Have found some good tips in the forums on improving the frame rate. But I still need to have most of the game's graphics settings on low to prevent stuttering, mostly during attacks on ground targets. Dogfights don't seem to be a problem. Was wondering if I should upgrade my graphics card to something more powerful?

 

Here's my system:

 

Celeron CPU 2.8GHz

memory 1022MB RAM

NViDA GeForce FX5500, display memory 256MB

Windows XP Home Edition, Directx 9.0c

 

I've added the WoV service patches frome Third Wire, so it should be up to date. Where do you think the bottleneck is? Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

[-boot]

I use the exact same setup on medium with very little trouble

[stevevag]

Thanks Guys,

 

for your comments. Sounds like I don't need a more powerful graphics card for WoV. Perhaps more tweaking is needed to get more out of my current system. I'd like to run effects at medium, but the game stutters when I'm firing onboard guns at enemy jets or ground targets at close range.

 

My WoV graphics settings are currently:

 

Object detail medium

Object texture medium

 

Cockpit mirrors off

cockpit reflection off

Shadow off

Horizon distance near

 

everything else: effects, terrain, ground, etc set to low.

 

800x600x16 screen

4:3 display aspect ratio

[Darrin]

Thanks Guys,

 

for your comments. Sounds like I don't need a more powerful graphics card for WoV. Perhaps more tweaking is needed to get more out of my current system. I'd like to run effects at medium, but the game stutters when I'm firing onboard guns at enemy jets or ground targets at close range.

 

My WoV graphics settings are currently:

 

Object detail medium

Object texture medium

 

Cockpit mirrors off

cockpit reflection off

Shadow off

Horizon distance near

 

everything else: effects, terrain, ground, etc set to low.

 

800x600x16 screen

4:3 display aspect ratio

heres what i got intel R

celeron R

cpu 2.66

504 mb

windows xp

2002 service pack two

nvidea Geforce4 mx 4000 128 mb

settings:

all medium except ; object detail high

effect detail high

cockpit high

simalier to yours and once in a blue moon

when my flight engages ground with guns does it slow down'and only while they are firing 4 seconds and bak to norm

and when i recently camo'ed my wing man's a-7 a got a slide show but very rarley does this happen i believe yours to be better than mine so dont give up yet. this happens very rarely so check your ddr ram mines 128 just a thought

[tank03]

Try the following mod as found in the knowledge base. With it I can now run mostly medium/high level graphics without a hitch with my crappy system.

 

The full article is here (by Chip and Charles):

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=8786

 

But the graphics mod is this portion (quoted from the above article):

"In the flightengine.ini file (in the flightdata.cat) there is something interesting! Under the section for:

 

[HighDetailOption]

HorizonDistance=75000.0

DetailMeshSize=6

DetailLevel=1

WaterEffect=1

NoiseTexture=1

MaxTextureRes=0 (you will read -1 here)

 

The last line is the texture resolution aka mipmap LOD setting in the graphic card control panel or any tweak tool. The thing I wondered about is that the stock setting there is -1. That means that the game uses it's own mipmap setting rather than the one I set in RivaTuner. I have set the mipmap LOD to 0, cause a negative value will automatically decrease the fps rate quite a bit.

 

Even -0,5 is too tough. When you know fly with the max detail settings in SF, you will automatically forced to fly with a mipmap detail of -1. That's a heavy load on the CPU cause the standard setting is always 0! On the ground I had around 25fps, now I have 38 with the mipmap distance to 0 and Vsync on. You can set the mipmap distance in OpenGL but not under D3D, so you need a tweaker. Always wondered, why the fps is so low in the cockpit, now I know why.

 

It only affects the highest detail settings cause for the lower detail, there are numbers around 265 which is pretty low. Set it to 0 and you can turn on the cockpit mirrors while the game stays smooth and you can use the highest detail in the game! It runs so much smoother now. Don't know why TK decided to use -1 cause there really is almost no viewable difference in the terrain quality. Hope I could help some of you who had notoriously low fps rates. You can even try a positive value like 0,5 which wouldn't look much different either. So there is no need to drop the detail."

 

Additionally, getting rid of the radar display in the upper right corner sped things up for me as well.

Edited February 15, 2007 by tank03

[BOOM]

I run a 5200 on (mostly) full settings with no trouble exept on those crazy 50+ aircraft missions

[stevevag]

<<Try the following mod as found in the knowledge base. With it I can now run mostly medium/high level graphics without a hitch with my crappy system.

 

[HighDetailOption]

HorizonDistance=75000.0

DetailMeshSize=6

DetailLevel=1

WaterEffect=1

NoiseTexture=1

MaxTextureRes=0 (you will read -1 here)

>>

 

I put in the above mod a few days ago, and it seemed to improve on the frame rates during a dogfight considerably. However, I think there's still room for improvement, considering you guys are getting better performance running similar hardware. Also, other simulators like CFS2 and FS2004 don't seem to run as well as they should on the higher graphics settings. I wonder if I have some security programs running in the background that are slowing things down?

[stevevag]

Turns out my sub par system performance in running WoV was greatly alliviated by performing some Windows XP tweeks that I forgot to do when I bought my new system. These tweeks originally came from an article in PC Aviator magazine. I got them a few years ago from a forum on the www.Hovercontrol.com website, and used them to boost the performance of my FS2002 sim on my old Toshiba notebook PC.

 

Here's the Windows XP tweeks I performed.

 

Disable Last File Access Stamping:

To turn this off go to the command prompt:

At the command prompt enter the following:

FSUTIL BEHAVIOR SET DISABLELASTACCESS 1

If you ever want to turn it back on again enter: FSUTIL BEHAVIOR SET DISABLELASTACCESS 0 . Then Reboot computer.

 

Turn Off Windows Indexing:

To turn it off go to Control Panel => Add/Remove Programs => Windows Components. Then deselect Indexing Service.

 

Increase File System Cache:

Perform the following:

CONTROL PANEL => SYSTEM => ADVANCED => PERFORMANCE => SETTINGS => ADVANCED => MEMORY USAGE. Change the option from Programs to System Cache. Reboot computer.

 

Clean Windows Registry:

A great Trialware program called Ace Utilities that will clean out your Windows registry from old, obsolete, and incorrect Windows registry settings is. You can get this free at:

http://www.acelogix.com/downloads/aceutils.exe

But before I ran the Ace utilities, I first created a restore point I could rollback the system to if anything went wrong. Anytime one messes with the Windows registry there's always the possibility of screwing up the XP operating system. After you have cleaned your Windows registry then reboot.

 

Set the "Launch folder windows in separate process setting":

Open the "My Computer\Tools\Folder Options\View -and tick the "Launch folder windows in separate process" box. Window XP will open any new window (including program) in its own memory and in separate process priority. This increases stability and speed but uses much more RAM than before. So I think you need lots of extra RAM to see any benefit from this.

 

In addition, I got this last performance tip from

www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#page_executive

If you have 512 megs or more of memory, you can increase system performance by having the core system kept in memory.

But before I made the registry changes, I first created a restore point I could rollback the system to if anything went wrong.

 

Start Regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive

Set the value to be 1

Reboot the computer.

Instead of using Regedit to make this change, I downloaded a program from this website and executed it. It made the change for me.

 

Now I'm getting much better performance from all my flight simulators, and can run WoV on higher graphics settings without any stuttering from low frame rates. But I'm not sure which of the above tips made the most difference. Perhaps some of the tips may have a nasty side effect I'm not yet aware of? If anyone knows about these or any other Windows XP performance tips, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Perhaps these kinds of tips are already available somewhere on www.combatace.com or another combat flight sim forum?

[j33l]

I think that configueration is good enough for full details i know cz i play mine on Geforce Fx 128 Memory its still good tilll medium.

One of my friend plays it one a Geforce MX 400 It still runs great on low configration but a little sloopy.And why is SFP1 Full fast and WOV/WOE running slow on his pc?

[Guest Sony Tuckson]

check if anisotropic filtering and FSAA are disabled through Nvidia control panel, as this would slow you down

Edited February 18, 2007 by Sony Tuckson

[j33l]

There is no Control Panel in Geforce MX. He uses Driver no 29.42 and there is no panel and te newer driver slow the games down even Delta force 1 Plays slow on the new driver!

[tank03]

check if anisotropic filtering and FSAA are disabled through Nvidia control panel, as this would slow you down

 

I've just installed a new graphics card (a Nvidia GeForce 6200OC, an improvement over the stock Dell card) and now I have some options. Unfortunately I don't know what they mean.

 

Anisotropic filtering? I can set it to OFF, 2x,4x,8x,16x. What is it and what should I set it to?