Local Sacred 2 LAN party - Need help for low end machine

[ws5926 1]

I am having about 10-12 friends over next Saturday night for a LAN party. I have been hyping up Sacred 2 for everyone, so I'm hoping it will be the main game played. I have all 12 machines that we will be using already at my place and I have bought 3 copies of Sacred 2, so I am legal on all those machines.

 

My question - I have one machine that is just under the minimum specs. When things get hectic on the screen (multiple enemies) that machine slows to a crawl. Besides setting all of the main menu settings to low, and all my graphic card settings to performance, what else can I do to optimize frame rates?

 

I have already defragged, pulled down latest updates to OS/graphics card and uninstalled Windows Search. Before the game is loaded I will also kill off any unneeded programs through Task Manager. I am running XP Pro, AMD 2800, 1.25gb ram.

 

One trick I am going to do is put that machine on a 17in monitor and limit the camera distance. When that machine zooms in, the framerate improves. Oh and that machine will definitely NOT be hosting a game. ha ha.

 

I figure that there has to be some more advanced settings in a config file somewhere to make this game run on a lower end machine smoothly. We played Sacred 2 some at the last LAN party that I hosted, but I didn't have enough machines that could play it smoothly, so we had to play others.

 

Thanks in advance for any responses to this post.

[locolagarto 15]

Wow It sounds like to did everything that I would have tried. Good luck with your party, it sounds like a blast!

[JaguarGal 0]

Urgh, we had a similar issue while LANing over here. Eventually, the characters just showed up as black holes on the screen, and the game wouldn't even start into action. But it sounds like yours isn't doing *That* badly.

I'm kind of thinking that, since it's still running slow after all that you've done, the only thing you could really do is upgrade the memory on it x:

 

Good luck with the LAN, at any rate! Always fun stuff <3

~Jaggy

[ws5926 1]

I'm kind of thinking that, since it's still running slow after all that you've done, the only thing you could really do is upgrade the memory on it x:

 

My next step was to upgrade the machine to 2gb and overclock the processor. I have 7 x 80mm fans in the case with 2 of them sitting directly on top of the processor heatsink. The AMD 2800 chip really runs at about 2.1ghz, so I guess I'm really well under the minimum specs for the game. If I could overclock it to 2.5 or 2.6, I'm guessing that would make a big difference in addition to the 2gb memory.

 

I know how to limit the zoom distance in the config file, so I guess I'll just go through the rest of the file shutting every option I can find off and see what happens.

 

I have noticed a BIG difference between a machine with 1gb and 2gb playing on a lan game, so I'm hoping that will bring it up to playable. I should just say that if you are playing that machine it's your fault for getting to the party last! ha ha.

[Nihilith 0]

Hi ws.

You should have a look at services running on your comp. There's a lot of them which aren't needed for everyday use such as bluetooth service, dhcp (just setup the network card to a static ip adress) and so on. Which cg card does this comp have. Maybe a swap between two machines could be helpful. For example if you got a powerful pc with a powerful cg card and this one handling a low end card, you could improve this machine by using the high perf card and the powerful pc may not be hurt much by a less powerful card...

[ws5926 1]

You should have a look at services running on your comp.

 

Already doing this. I kill just about everything I can that will still let me see the network and not give me the reboot message.

[gogoblender 3,070]

Welcome to DarkMatters Will!

The Lan sounds awesome! Me and Schot run one here, but we've never really run a bigger lan with folks here...reading your post has gotten me thinking, and this could be a cool way to hook up with some of the Sacred 2 Community here in Montreal.

 

Best wishes to the success of your Ascaron party, may your comps blaze, and the game make you proud!

 

 

gogo

[ws5926 1]

Thanks gogo, I will post my list of things I did to get it running on the low end machine after the party.

[ws5926 1]

Thanks gogo, I will post my list of things I did to get it running on the low end machine after the party.

 

I found one thing that really helped out one system, but didn't do anything to another. I added -nocpubinding to the shortcut to start the game. The machine that I added it to was a Pentium 4 2.6. I don't know if that machine had HT or not. I added that line to a machine that had a AMD 2800+ and it didn't improve anything. I'm guessing that means that the 2.6 has HT because I know for sure that the AMD 2800+ is not a HT or multicore machine.

 

I'm assuming that means that adding -nocpubinding to the shortcut of a HT or multicore machine will increase framerate. Doesn't make sense to me, but if it works, it works.