Things that helped me to improve performance

[LupusX]

First off I want to say that I've been anticipating this game for some time. X3R with X-tended probably has more hours of proc time on my machine than any other game, and I once played MMO's so that is really saying something. This franchise has been a real win in my book. So to all the dozens of people I owe thanks to for the entertainment, thank you!

As I was downloading the game through Steam yesterday, I did the usual read through the forums to find the problems that inevitably occur with a brand new (1.x.x) game and put together a list of things that I will need to do to make the game run on my poor old computer

My box:
P4 3.06
2 GB ram
Radeon X850XT
SB Audigy2 ZS

Here is the list o' tweaks, and how much they helped.

Disable FFDShow from running with X3TC: Helped a lot with stability and stutter.

OC my video card: Didn't really notice much difference, but it can't hurt. Even if it's just 1 or 2 FPS, at this point it can make a difference in playability

Upgraded to 2GB from 1GB: It helped about as much as the FFDShow. For the record old DDR ram is expensive now, if you don't order it off the internet

Lower the Resolution: This helped more than anything else.

So now my maximum playable settings are:

1024x768x32 (sad but true, and caused LOTS of jaggies till...)
4xAA (Helps lots and makes up a little for the Rez loss)
2xAF (Helps with the texture res loss)
Everything else on High, or Enabled


I really need to upgrade my box, I know. The game looked beautiful with higher resolution/AA/AF but it was a beautiful slideshow, and combat was as much luck as skill...essentially unplayable. Now the game is mostly smooth, and far more playable. I'm going to try 8xAA since the jaggies drive me nuts, and AA is one of my cards strengths, but I think that I am really hitting a wall since going down an AA level and up a resolution level should be approximately equivalent in terms of the amount of data that needs to be processed. If anyone has any additional tips I will be happy to try it. Thanks

LupusX

[/b]

[xavierd]

set your resolution to normal and drop textures to medium. it'll still look great and your fps will go through the roof

edit: oh, some other stuff. check your sound/video drivers are up to date
rename "x3tcfolder/mov/00002.dat", this will disable videos on the floating billboards
if you're running vista, stick a pendrive in and tell vista to use it as readyboost. this will help with excessive HD access due to low memory
make sure you have patch 1.2.1 (steam should have it up by now)
and the biggest increase of all, more than 2gb ram. i just upgraded to 4gb and even on 32bit vista my fps is peachy now

[LupusX]

Still running XP here, at least until Windows 7 comes out. By then the core I7 gear should be cheaper (and thoroughly bug-tested!) XP 32 bit can't really do anything with more than 2.5 GB of ram except run more slowly... 8(. I'll give the texture/resolution swap a try and see if it makes a playability difference. Thank you for the tips!

EDIT: So I tried upping the resolution and turning the textures down and turning on the AF. It runs about the same, with fewer jaggies though, which is very nice! Up close the stations don't look as nice, but it's a fair trade. Thanks a lot bro!

[BugMeister]

- how many HDD's have you got onboard..??

- reason I ask is cos you can do some tricks with the Windows pagefile in XP..
- like move it away from the OS, and set it to the max size possible

- I have two HDD's - the WindowsXPHome OS is on C: (160G drive) and the pagefile on E: (40G drive)
- with my 2G RAM set-up, I've set the pagefile at 3070MB min and max
- it cuts down on the transfer timings, apparently..
- it doesn't just apply to X3:TC, either - your over-all system performance will benefit..

- you can do it with a single, partitioned drive as well
- but I've stayed away from partitions, meself..
======================================

- and here's another one that helps with TC's performance..
-it works with WindowsXP Home.. don't know about other OS's..

- go to Control Panel\Sounds and Audio Devices\Speaker Settings\Advanced\Performance..

- move the slider for "Sample rate conversion quality" back to Good..
- this has made X3 run incredibly smoothly for me - and it helps with TC, too....

PS - that's with a Creative Audigy 4 soundcard, but it may work with on-board sound, as well..

[LupusX]

I'm actually running 3. 2 drives in Raid 0 with my boot, swap, and games, and the third with a backup of everything important. I don't trust raid 0 but I do like the performance. Setting your swap to a partition on a separate drive would help, but in a separate partition on the same drive would probably just brutalize your performance since the read heads would have to swing back and forth between the edges of the disk, and wherever the data it was loading lives on your HDD. For certain software they actually recommend that you have a separate physical drive for temporary files/swap files. Usually video editing.

I used to set my swap file to a fixed size back in the Win98 days, but some time ago I read an article from one of the big hardware sites and the performance impact with Windows XP was below the margin of error whenever it improved performance, and whenever the system ran out of swap space, it did things to the performance that you can't say in front of women or priests.

In your case you would see more improvement getting a more modern drive on which to place your swap file. Something huge with multiple platters is best for read/write access. Your 40GB drive most likely is a single or dual platter drive with data density that is relatively sparse in comparison with today's drives.

Heh, listen to me getting preachy about old hardware when my box is so old, my grandad has to call it sir...

As for my newest status update, I had to crank the graphics back down to 1024 x 768 with medium textures. I got into a furball with about 40 ships onscreen, and the game became a slideshow again.

I miss my LX.

Thanks again! I'll keep tweaking and see if I can find the magic button to make it run better.


The latest tweak was renaming the directx DLL in the game directory, so that it uses the windows default directx DLL. Net effect, none.

I'll try your audio tweak tonight. Thanks again!

LupusX

[BugMeister]

cheers for the additional info on the HDD's, LupusX

-much appreciated..

[Psycked]

I run this game on 1080p 46" LCD, (highest res for this game for my LCD)

I'm running an AMD Phenom 9950 3.1Ghz
Nvidia 8800GTX
4GB RAM
Win XP PRo

I run the game with max settings 4x AA and 4x Anisotropic (Game settings)

I ran the rolling demo benchmark and it spec'ed my average FPS at 40FPS

when watching it I only noticed performance drop into the low to mid 20's when it put a butt load of ships on the screen at once.

In game I hardly ever run into lag. No problems fighting yet, sometimes I notice the lag but a quick restart and it seems to have improved.

[carran]

From Task Manager right click X3TC.exe and Set Priority to Realtime...

[EventHorizon]

From Task Manager right click X3TC.exe and Set Priority to Realtime...

I would highly recommend that you don't do that! It's not really possible to fully explain why (it would take far too long) but changing the priority of any thread/process can (and will in the case of realtime) have significant effects on other processes - if it crashes winword.exe who cares? If it crashes dllhost.exe, services.exe or any of the really hidden processes then you can get into a right mess!

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

@EventHorizon: to add to that, I've never seen any performance difference by changing the priority to a higher value.

[elayeth]

My comp is rather lower end of gaming machines:
Notebook (!) Lenovo with 2GB RAM and ATI V5200

However I managed to get playable FPS of 20-30 in most situations on following settings:
Res: 1024x768x32
Textures: medium
AA – none
AF – none
Glow enabled

What helped me (some 50% improvement!) was:
1. Omega drivers which are IMHO better for ATI users
2. ATI Tray Tool instead of Catalyst
3. Overclocking with a.m. Tool by ca 10-15%
4. Windows reinstall and defrag

However in bigger fights in sectors with lots of asteroids I get my FPS to as low as 13-16 which is painful… Thus I am wondering if anything else could be done, except for bying regular PC (as far as I know updating video card is not possible for notebooks…)?