sorry but this game sucks money wasted after playing x2 and x3

[beyer_garratt]

Try getting rid of Windows Vista and running WinXP 3.0.

That might help any slow running or instability you're experiencing.

[Whitegaurd]

Umm, in case you guys havn't noticed, it seems barryd007uk3 is gone, Kapeesh... Vanished.
Probably only registered to have a piss at Egosoft, not realizing that they community here would actually HELP him.

*sigh* I hate those sort of people. Don't bother having a whine if you don't have any serious reason to.

I correct myself, My apologies.

[Master Breytac]

Be thankful the X series isn't released by EA. We would have far worse problems than bugs to worry about *cough* SecuROM *cough*.

[Nelviticus]

Barry, I'm sure the problem is your graphics card - a 9500GT just isn't a very powerful card and X3 is a demanding game. Have a look at some of the results in this comparison:
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15658&page=7
The 9500 GT is the one on the right - it can manage an average of 22 frames per second in Company of Heroes at 1280 x 1024 with anti-aliasing turned off. That's an average, so a lot of the time it will drop below that and anything less than 25 fps will look very choppy. Those results were run at roughly a similar resolution to you (1440 x 900) in a similarly-demanding game and are not really good enough to be playable. The 9500 GT is powerful enough for older games but not X3.

[Kitch]

Heres the solution we all should try.
Return the game from whence it came, get your money back (after all its a defective product).
Wait 12 months.
Now buy the game, patched and maybe expanded, from the bargin bucket at your local game store.
It worked for me on X3R and I'm happier for it.

I would like to see you try that seeing as most retailers won't give you your money back for an opened game, they'll just let you exchange it for the exact same product. We can thank people who buy the games, copy them then return them for that little nugget of punishment.

In the UK

Under the Sale Of Goods Act the seller (not the manufacturer) is obliged to give you a refund on anything that is "inherently faulty."

A game that doesn't work or has major bugs in it can be argued as inherently faulty and not "fit for purpose" in the condition it was sold.

If it is faulty (not it works but you changed your mind about it) and they won't give you a refund, they could be breaking the law and you can report them to Consumer Direct - Clicky


Personally, I know bugs will be fixed by patches or community scripts and I love the game anyway, but thats just me.

[xeon_1]

Your pc is fine just for the gfx card.
that card will strugle with every new game even at medium to low resoluitions.

[Mars Mug]

A game that doesn't work or has major bugs in it can be argued as inherently faulty and not "fit for purpose" in the condition it was sold.

I'm not convinced that you could successfully argue that faults in the game are significant enough to have prevented all enjoyment, and the seller could provide evidence from places like this forum where many people argue that the game is quite playable making the ‘inherent fault’ argument very subjective. You may well win a small claim however where the seller can’t be bothered to provide someone to attend court because of the time/cost, but if everyone did this then I expect the game would be removed from shelves or the sellers would attend court.

[esd]

There's also your processor. While a good multi-core, the clockspeed of each core is actually quite low:

Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) 8450 Triple-Core Processor (3 CPUs), ~2.1GHz

So it's pretty much running on a 2.1Ghz processor (though one of the other cores will take system tasks, etc).

Please also post your full [url=http://www.egosoft.com/support/faq/faq_answer_en.php?answer=610&version=8][b]DX[/b][b]D[/b]iag[/url] output - yup, the whole thing!

(Moved to Tech Support so we can help them - so let's cut the chitchat )

[Poobah]

Could just... turn the resolution down.

And yeah, while you do have three CPUs the game is only going to be running on one of them, and that one is tickling the minimum reqs.

I'd really like to be able to build a decent PC for £500

[DeadlyDarkness]

This game is in serious need of multi threading. Now you could argue that is kind of difficult to program, but even with a simple form, i.e one core for graphics and one for scripts, performance would be improved significantly.

[Carlo the Curious]

Please also post your full DXDiag output - yup, the whole thing!

He did in another thread.

[barryd007uk3]

sorry but i play company of heros "love the game" and i get a frame rate of 49 with full on graphics the test you saw was for a 9500gt with 256 meg mine is a 9500gt pro with 1gig it makes a big difference and even when i play wow with 2 accounts running at once ie multiboxing the frame rate on that is still 60 fps and thats running 2 games at once on two monitors guys you have to admit i love the idea of x3 and x3tc but you have to admit its not that good when it slows to a snails pace were it is unplayable as for the triple core its 2.1 for each procceser that makes a total of 6.3mghz the game runs the same on my other computer with amd 3500+ chip 1gig mem and 512mb nvidea 8600gt pro so i have to say its not the specs of the computers but the faults in the game if they fix it fine but untill then it will be x3 and other games i play

[Mubata]

For a good multithreaded app, 3 cores working together helps tremendously. However since X3TC is not multithreaded, and most likely will not ever be, individual core speed has a greater impact single threaded CPU operations which can only be executed on one core.

That video card should be more than adequate as long as you are not running high levels of AA or AF. However, since some graphic settings also require a little work from the CPU, alleviating any additional CPU loading is going to help your framerate. Shutting down any programs that arn't needed prior to start, lower resolution, as well as turning off post processing effects can help. X3TC, more often than not, after a few days game time, is way more CPU bound than GPU bound. In your dxdiag, in the other therad, it was noted that there are a fair amount of Nero directshow filters in there. Removing those if you can could improve your performance as well since they are known to cause issues.

[eladan]

@barryd007uk3 - I just about went blue trying to read that! Some punctuation would help enormously.

As Mubata mentioned, TC can only take advantage of a single core, so having multiple cores provides little benefit (it will provide some, as other operating system tasks can be run on the other cores, which allows TC to have an entire core to itself.)

X3 is also unusual in that it's one of the few games where you can be CPU limited. Most games are limited by the graphics card.

[Social-Pariah]

Why you would take a game that will stress CPUs to this degree and NOT make it multicore compatable is a question that will go properly unanswered I suppose. That being an answer more than, "it would have been a lot of work", yes, God forbid that work should be put in to improving the infrastructure to handle the game you want to make rather than throwing paltry, bug ridden features in and making a game that is abysmal on 95% of computers. As is, I've given up on this game that I shelled out my precious money for until they eventually get round to making it playable and fun in the next years time, though obviously I was hoping to play it now, rather than a year post purchase once I stopped giving the slightest s@#t about it.

I'm just waiting for Egosoft to go bust or break up like Flagship Studios and leave all us customers in the lerch, whilst they move on to brighter and better things.

[eladan]

Why you would take a game that will stress CPUs to this degree and NOT make it multicore compatable is a question that will go properly unanswered I suppose.

How about this: The engine that TC is based on was written prior to multicore CPUs becoming popular. There was no compelling reason at the time the engine was written to make it multithreaded, as very few systems would have been able to make use of the feature.

[(----____JEFF____----)]

@eladan: I understand that you say that and the fact that it is a add on kinda makes up for the fact they didn't write an entirely new engine (or seriously modified one at that). But when they started on TC multicore CPUs where already in widespread use, so at that time there was a compelling reason (at least the way I look at it) and if they did it before development of TC it wouldn't have been so much trouble, compared to the trouble it would take if they did it now.

[googlemeier]

see: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=2158520 from June 07.
I had bought my multicore system in Nov 2005, before I bought X3 Reunion.
For playing X3R the extra processor was useless then,
for X3TC my whole system is useless.

[eladan]

I don't have any information about why they chose to reuse the same engine, although I'd speculate that it's probably because the publisher wouldn't provide the cash and/or time to allow them to rewrite the engine.

Whatever the reason, the game was always advertised as an expansion, which means it was using the same engine.

I had bought my multicore system in Nov 2005, before I bought X3 Reunion.

Yes, I realise multicores existed at the time Reunion was released, but:

1. There were still relatively few people who had multicore PCs
2. Clearly, the X3 engine was written well prior to that time, possibly before multicores were released at all.

[supakillaii]

So Zip Zap Zup, Barry, get a new processor. Shazam, should help a little.