Dismal Performance in BF2 Despite Loweing Settings

erorr404

Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2005
Messages
646
i have a feeling that my CPU is bottlenecking BF2 performance. changing dynamic shadows, dynamic lights, and lighting (3 of the most demanding settings) from High to Medium makes no difference FPS-wise. i still get almost unplayable performance with the framerate usually staying in mid to low 20's. people tend to get very playable framerates in the 30's or 40's with their 6600GT's. so, is it my CPU that's responsible for the crappy performance, or are there others with the 6600GT that get such low framerates?
 
wow, try turning OFF dynamic lights and shadows. They seem to be one of the biggest FPS hitters in BF2.
 
i thought "low" was the lowest setting. ill check it out and see if it makes a difference.
 
Yes, Low is the lowest, just try that. That should help you. Consider yourself luck, I only get 20 FPS on all low :rolleyes: .
 
people with my video card seem to get much better performance, so i dont think im too lucky ;)
 
I do 1600x1200 with 2xAA/8xAF with most settings on medium with a 6800GT. It sounds like you've got some driver/software issue holding you back.
 
I've got a simliar setup and the game runs pretty well with all but textures and lighting set to high. Make sur eyou have the latest nVidia drivers that came with the game. Using the setup in the sig I get between 40-60fps.
 
i have the 77.30's that came with the demo, im using 1024x768, 2x AA, no AF. setting textures to medium or low shouldnt make any difference, as i have 1.5 gigs of RAM. what can the problem possibly be? :(
 
erorr404 said:
i have the 77.30's that came with the demo, im using 1024x768, 2x AA, no AF. setting textures to medium or low shouldnt make any difference, as i have 1.5 gigs of RAM. what can the problem possibly be? :(

take off the 2xAA, crank everything but textures, shadows, and lighting up to high. Put the previous on medium.
 
i dont see why textures should be on medium since i have 1.5 GB of RAM, but ill try it.
 
i set texures, dynamic shadows, lighting, and dynamic lights to medium, turned AA off, 1024x768, and everything else on high, but i still get bad performance. framerate is still in the low-20's, so theres not much performance difference between this and all high.
 
Cpu really bottlenecks with polygons, so you should see better performance with a reduced view distance.

With your gfx waiting on cpu to do things you should be able to get things like texture quality / AA / AF for "free"
 
for me, turning Dynamic lights and Dynamic shadows to "off" improved performance drastically. This was on the demo, so I can't speak for the full version.

-Ace-
 
a 2.6 gig P4 is not much these days. No slam, but it's the truth.

I was able to play the demo 100% online by just going with the game settings as the game set them for me, which was 800 X 600 with all the settings on medium. Since I was using a 2500+ Barton ( Oc'ed to 3000+) and a 9500 Pro (oced 310/310) I tried jacking it to 1024 X 768. AF/AA killed any chance of playing on line. No stutters, no lockups, no problems. I wasnt getting 200 fps but I could kill people sho nuff.

My system barely met the minimum requirements, but I was able to play the game OK. I see so many people having problems on here and they got systems that are state of the art compared to mine. I gotta think it's operator error when some dude with a system 3 times faster than mine starts bitching about how the game sux becuase it lags. :rolleyes:

They need to either figure shit out or go buy a console. Plus they dont get that each Battlefield game in the series has been buggy on the first release, sux, but thats the way EA does business. They put the shit out when it's "good enough" and by the time it hits about 1.3 it's great.

Fix yer shit people. Too much crying going on in here from people got 4X the computer I did.
 
Selecter said:
a 2.6 gig P4 is not much these days. No slam, but it's the truth.
i wish mine was 2.6 GHz.


Selecter said:
I was able to play the demo 100% online by just going with the game settings as the game set them for me, which was 800 X 600 with all the settings on medium. Since I was using a 2500+ Barton ( Oc'ed to 3000+) and a 9500 Pro (oced 310/310) I tried jacking it to 1024 X 768. AF/AA killed any chance of playing on line. No stutters, no lockups, no problems. I wasnt getting 200 fps but I could kill people sho nuff.

My system barely met the minimum requirements, but I was able to play the game OK. I see so many people having problems on here and they got systems that are state of the art compared to mine. I gotta think it's operator error when some dude with a system 3 times faster than mine starts bitching about how the game sux becuase it lags. :rolleyes:

They need to either figure shit out or go buy a console. Plus they dont get that each Battlefield game in the series has been buggy on the first release, sux, but thats the way EA does business. They put the shit out when it's "good enough" and by the time it hits about 1.3 it's great.

Fix yer shit people. Too much crying going on in here from people got 4X the computer I did.
what does any of this have to do with my thread?
 
you got 2.5X the video card I do, and another 512MB of ram, and I still get better performance. Try putting every single video setting the game has on MEDIUM, for starters. That might get you headed in the right direction.

Ever think a 128MB video card has enough memory to hold textures on the card...? It dont. Set everything to medium. High ANYTHING in this game is for 256MB 6800 class cards and up. With a 2.26 P4 and a 6600 you are thinking your system is much better than it is.

Keep turning the shit DOWN until you get decent rates, no stutter, no lag.

No, on second thought just ignore everything I just said. :rolleyes:
 
Selecter said:
you got 2.5X the video card I do, and another 512MB of ram, and I still get better performance.
uhhh, of course you get better performance running everything on low than i do on high :rolleyes:. if i were running on low, i would be getting twice the performance you are.


Selecter said:
Ever think a 128MB video card has enough memory to hold textures on the card...? It dont.
perhaps if you actually read the thread, you would have seen that i tried turning textures down, and got absolutely no performance gain. and that makes sense, since i have 1.5GB of RAM and AGP aperture size set to 512MB. setting textures to high hasnt been a problem in Doom 3 or HL2 ever since i upgraded to 1.5GB, and apparently it isn't in this game either.


Selecter said:
Set everything to medium. High ANYTHING in this game is for 256MB 6800 class cards and up. With a 2.26 P4 and a 6600 you are thinking your system is much better than it is.
where did you come up with such BS? please go read some threads and see what settings other 6600GT users are running before you start making things up.


Selecter said:
Keep turning the shit DOWN until you get decent rates, no stutter, no lag.
uhh, no thanks. i already know that i should be getting playable framerates on this card with everything set to high other than dyn. shadows, dyn. lights, and lighting. the problem obviously lies elsewhere - either my CPU is holding me back, or there is some software-related issue.


come on Selecter, stop bitching and crying. just because your video card is crap, doesn't mean everyone else has to use low settings. go troll in some other thread. :rolleyes:
 
I sold that setup to a guy and at work who wanted to play and couldnt afford anything better. I'm researching a new build now. BTW all my settings were at Medium except for shadows and lighting, which were at low. I sold him all the guts for $150.00, which bought a iSight webcam for my Mac. I'll buy something here in a few weeks for BF 2 once I recover from a injury I incurred recently.

Since I got better performance from the system I just sold, which had a much worse video card than you do, and 512 MB less RAM than you got, maybe it's not a troll eh? You're the one asking for help with their system. I didnt need any. I installed the game and it ran great for what I had. When I see people complaining in here about how their fuckin X2 stutters in game and it's unplayable and Dice sux - well shit, I might have something to say about it.

You probably have something both wrong with your system and/or you dont know what you are doing, and it's usually a combination of both.

How about we just say F - U to each other and move on eh? I think you're a dick, and you think I'm one for sure. So call it tie. At age 42 I got better things to do than piss on a pissant.
 
Selecter said:
I sold that setup to a guy and at work who wanted to play and couldnt afford anything better. I'm researching a new build now. BTW all my settings were at Medium except for shadows and lighting, which were at low. I sold him all the guts for $150.00, which bought a iSight webcam for my Mac. I'll buy something here in a few weeks for BF 2 once I recover from a injury I incurred recently.

Since I got better performance from the system I just sold, which had a much worse video card than you do, and 512 MB less RAM than you got, maybe it's not a troll eh? You're the one asking for help with their system. I didnt need any. I installed the game and it ran great for what I had. When I see people complaining in here about how their fuckin X2 stutters in game and it's unplayable and Dice sux - well shit, I might have something to say about it.

You probably have something both wrong with your system and/or you dont know what you are doing, and it's usually a combination of both.

How about we just say F - U to each other and move on eh? I think you're a dick, and you think I'm one for sure. So call it tie. At age 42 I got better things to do than piss on a pissant.
then why the hell did you start this bullshit? when did i ever say EA or Dice sucks? when did i ever complain about ANYTHING AT ALL?? all i said before you started this was that im getting bad perfromance, i should be getting better with this setup, and that i need help. that is ALL I SAID. you must be confusing my thread with others that you read complaining about BF2 or the demo. if i have an obvious framerate problem with the game, can you explain to me why i cant ask for help on this forum? PLEASE tell me where i went wrong, before we started this arguement.
 
i hope you realize that you did start this flaming with your first post. it seemed totally rude and uncalled for to me. it seemed like a totally pointless rant. thus i made the short reply that i did, which seemed to piss you off even more. i think that all of these constant threads about BF2 problems are pissing lots of people off (including you), and you decided to take it out on me.
now, i'll reply to your first post, in hopes that you will help me better understand what you are saying.


Selecter said:
a 2.6 gig P4 is not much these days. No slam, but it's the truth.
i realize that, and that is why i asked whether my processor was the bottleneck in the system.

Selecter said:
I was able to play the demo 100% online by just going with the game settings as the game set them for me, which was 800 X 600 with all the settings on medium. Since I was using a 2500+ Barton ( Oc'ed to 3000+) and a 9500 Pro (oced 310/310) I tried jacking it to 1024 X 768. AF/AA killed any chance of playing on line. No stutters, no lockups, no problems. I wasnt getting 200 fps but I could kill people sho nuff.
thats fine, but im not happy with all medium settings and a low resolution, because i should be able to play at 1024x768 with half the settings on high with no problem.

Selecter said:
My system barely met the minimum requirements, but I was able to play the game OK. I see so many people having problems on here and they got systems that are state of the art compared to mine. I gotta think it's operator error when some dude with a system 3 times faster than mine starts bitching about how the game sux becuase it lags. :rolleyes:
i hope you were not talking about me there, i never bitched about anything. i kindly asked for help with my framerate issue. i never put the game down, or it's developers, or anyone. i never said that my system wasnt at fault.
also, i dont see why you are angry about people having problems playing BF2 with a "state of the art" system, as you put it.
what do you mean by operator error? the person himself making a mistake? i dont see what possible mistakes i could have made when every other game i own (including Doom 3, HL2, San Andreas) works just as it does on systems with similar setups. i have the latest driver version of everything, 77.30 display drivers, DX9.0c, can you explain what possible errors i could have made? i really dont see what you're saying there.

Selecter said:
They need to either figure shit out or go buy a console. Plus they dont get that each Battlefield game in the series has been buggy on the first release, sux, but thats the way EA does business. They put the shit out when it's "good enough" and by the time it hits about 1.3 it's great.
ok... thats exacly what im trying to do. figure out what the problem is. what is wrong with me asking about it on these forums? just because the game doesnt run the way it's supposed to on my system, you automatically assume im a complete idiot and tell me to buy a console? geez.

Selecter said:
Fix yer shit people. Too much crying going on in here from people got 4X the computer I did.
so, because i have a better computer than you, i dont have a right to ask for help? i dont see the logic at all in that arguement you keep making. i could be wrong, but it sounds like jealousy to me.

do you have any suggestions at all on what can possibly be wrong, or how to go about fixing it, (besides loweing all of the settings)?
 
No, becuase thats exactly what I think you have to do to fix the problems. Lower the damn settings to low and play. Measure your rate and head up from there.

Use my settings as a guide. I got decent fps from my former setup, and I described my gear and what I was able to achieve with that setup. 1024 X 768, with no AA/AF, everything on medium except shadows and lighting both turned to low.

"but im not happy with all medium settings and a low resolution, because i should be able to play at 1024x768 with half the settings on high with no problem."

look, I know that you THINK you are supposed to be able to play the game on high, just like you said - but you cant. BF 2 is a HUGE HOG of a game, and only the best junk can make it there. I have to say that forum threads are just CHOCK FULL of guys like you all over the net about this game, and just about every one of them THINKS the game should be something that it's not. Reading your tale of woe was about the 3,784 thread on "whats wrong with my machine" re BF 2 I've read in the last 5 Days, and I'm just fucking overloaded on it. So I blew my stack and you were the unlucky soul that got it from me. I apologize.

Specific tips from me about how to make it better:

You have a unrealistic expectation about how the game SHOULD run; vs. how the game ACTUALLY DOES run. To find out where you start to crap out, just dump it on low and go up to there, or better yet, see how the game feels with a copy of my settings, becuase you have a better vid card than I did, but a slower CPU. I was running my Axp at 2.17 Ghz 3000+ speed OC'ed and my 9500 Pro at 310/310 Oc'ed. There was no way to get any more perfromance out of the system, it was maxed out. So I bit the big one and sold it.

Hardware: If you have a weak link in your hardware, it is your CPU. it's not terrible, but a 2.26 P4 is about the same as a 1700+ Athlon XP performance wise. I think a faster CPU would sure help, but I dont know how much. The honest truth from me is that you are just like everyone else I have seen post on this game They just cant accept that their machine that has been fine on a lot of other games sucks for this one, and they think something is wrong with their machine, when the truth is that the game is a huge RAM and video HOG
and their old machine just wont cut it anymore.

Set yourself free from what you THINK the game should do, and adopt your thinking to what YOU have to do to get the game to run the way you think it should, and I have doubts that your current rig can match your expectations. My old rig could not match my expectations on what I wanted it to do and I sold it off and am building for new. If I were you I would take that 6600 and build a cheap 939 Athlon box around it and sell what you have now to partially finance it. You will come out better that way I think, and between that and trying to get a faster P4 for your current rig, I think you would have much greater chance of success just doing a new build. I thought about getting a 6800 GT for my old rig but investing new money in a AGP card is not something I wanted to do. I've found that every 4 years or so, you just gotta throw out the old junk and start fresh.

No hard feelings.
 
the only reason i thought i should be able to run the game on higher settings, was from seeing other posts from 6600GT users getting much better performance. specifically, there was one with a guy who had all settings on high, except for dynamic shadows, dyn lights, and lighting, and managed to pull off 45 fps on his 6600GT.
believe me, if i saw some threads with 6600GT-ers getting results similar to mine, i would have no trouble accepting that this is how the game should run on my system. my expectations of how it should run on my system dont seem the least bit unrealistic judging from the results other users are getting with their 6600GT's.
you could be right, however. perhaps i should do some more research into what kind of performance other users with my setup are getting to see if my framerate really should be higher.
ill experiment with the settings and see if i can get good fps with all medium, like you suggested.
 
Through all of this BS there is some good advice.

I have a 3.4ghz P4, 1gig of DDR-400, and a 6800 GT, I run at 1600x1200 my settings are high, high, high, high, low, off, off, off, low, 100%. I get an average of 70fps boosting to 100 (which is max for BF2) to 45-50 when all is crazy.

So I have Dynamic lighting OFF, Dynamic Shadows OFF, AA OFF and Filtering set to Low. The 3 I have set to off are the MOST demanding and hurt your FPS the most. None of them affect the level of graphical detail. Personally I will ditch dynamic shadows (there are still static shadows) and lighting and AA waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy before I lower the detail. Honestly do you really notice dynamic shadows or Lighting or AA for that matter when your really into playing? Hell no, but you will notice the landscape/weapons/tanks/players....etc when they look like Doom 1 quality graphics.

Like some one said turn off AA, and all dynamic stuff, put the rest on medium and set your res to 1024x768 and then up each one until it starts to slow down. If you dont like the results then fix it by finding out what on your system hardware/software is lacking.

Some simple things would be to get rid of as many icons in your system tray................they = loaded apps that can conflict.
 
Sounds like the CPU is the bottleneck. Try turning down View distance to nothing if you havent already. That might help you out a bit.

If you have already tried that, please disregard. Hope you find a fix.
 
Dynamic shadows can mess with your mind too. I've seen player shadows cast on a hill, or a chain link fence and fired at them, and then realized it was myself, or a team mate casting shadows. I was blown away when I saw that.
 
I had some performance issues here as well. But I found some tweaks that made a huge difference. Especially one in particular that made sense once I found out.


Make sure PunkBuster is updating. It probably isn't so go to PunkBuster and DL PBweb.exe. and place it in your BF2/pb folder. Just run the pbweb.exe from that folder and it should fix that problem. What was happening to me was pb wasn't up to date. And it thinks your cheating because it's not up to date. So what it's doing is taking screen shots of you to relay to the pb servers for cheat evaluation.

Also Turn off EAX option in sound and disable VOIP, unless you really want to use it. The game runs a lot smoother graphically for me now that I did all 3 of the above mentioned fixes.

Hope this helps.
 
Back
Top