Poor Performance in Microsoft Games!!! [Archive]

thekingofpain

12-03-2000, 09:41 PM

MX madness is a fave of mine, I hope this may help you to optimize your play:

Drivers

The absolute first step when tweaking any hardware or software is to update your PC's drivers. The most important drivers to update for tweaking a game are your video card drivers. You can download updated drivers from WinDrivers.com.

It's also a good idea to check out the Motocross Madness 2 page to see if updates have been released. Updates for games (or "patches") will fix known problems and sometimes boost performance. Also, read the readme file included with the game to check for quick fixes and known problems.

Pre-Game Tips

Prior to starting Motocross Madness 2 (or any game for that matter), make sure you have closed all other programs that you don't need for the game, including RealPlayer, ICQ, Internet Explorer, and other such programs. These take up valuable memory and they may take away from the performance of the game. If you can't close all of the programs you wanted to close, hit the CTRL, ALT, and DELETE keys on your keyboard at the same time. A menu will pop-up that will ask what programs you wish to close. If there are any programs that you are sure you don't need, you can select them and choose "End Task" to close them. The more memory MCM2 has available, the less it should have to use the Windows swap file, which often slows down the game significantly.

Also keep in mind that the system requirements for this game call for at least 64 MB of system RAM. If your system falls short of this mark, you can probably expect excessive hard drive access, longer loading times, and occasional pauses in action for hard drive reads.

To ensure that MCM2 runs great and makes good use of its memory, there are a few steps you can take before you even start the game. Sometime when you have plenty of time, consider defragging your hard drive. This is a simple process and you've probably heard of it several times. Close all other programs in Windows, then go to the Start menu, and choose Run. Type defrag and then hit OK. It will take a while once it has started, but hard drive access is greatly optimized.

Another useful tip involves a simple BIOS tweak. To access the BIOS setup of your PC, reboot. When it is booting up (when you first turn the power on), you should see a message that says something similar to "Push DEL to Setup". Push the corresponding key and access the BIOS setup. Search around for the options that say "Video BIOS Shadow", "Video RAM Cacheable", and "Video BIOS Cacheable" or something similar. Disable these options. Write down any settings you changed in case you have to change them back. Save your settings and exit, then reboot into Windows.

Unless you're very low on hard drive space, make sure you did a typical installation for MCM2. This game takes a while to load and if it has to access the CD-ROM during loading of levels (rather than just the hard drive), it will load even slower. So if you chose to do a minimum installation, consider reinstalling MCM2 with a typical installation.

Sound Tweaks

Before we talk about tweaks for video, let us cover sound and memory tweaks. Start up Motocross Madness 2. Click the gears (third icon down) at the main menu to enter the Options menu. From here, head straight to the "Sound" tab.

-User interface sounds - This isn't really a performance tweak, but it will toggle the sounds in the menu navigation. It will make it so "beeps" and "blips" are not heard while navigating through the various menus of MCM2. It has no effect in-game.

-In-game Sound Effects - If you lack speakers, a sound card, or just don't want to hear the sound, uncheck this box for a performance boost and to save some memory.

-Use 3-D Sound Hardware - If you turn this feature on, it uses hardware accelerated sound. In most cases this leads to slightly degraded performance, but it increases audio quality. Leave this unchecked if you have a poor speaker set, need performance, or you just don't care about the sound.

-Use EAX Extensions - If your sound card supports this feature (many new sound cards do, including the Sound Blaster Live!), enable it to have very neat environmental audio such as reverb. On some systems, this may lead to poor audio quality and on most systems, severely degraded performance. This also takes more memory in some cases. Disable for performance.

-Waypoint Confirmation - This will not affect performance, but it's more of a preference. If enabled, the game will make a sound indicating that you have successfully cleared a gate.

-Quality - If you use a high-end sound card in a high-end PC with a lot of memory, you can use 16-bit sound with basically no performance hit. However, if you don't have much memory (e.g. your hard drive reads frequently during gameplay) or you've got a slow PC, 8-bit sound will improve performance and free some memory. It doesn't sound much worse than 16-bit either.

Graphics Tweaks

Click the Graphics tab inside the Options menu of MCM2. Ignore all the settings on the screen unless you know that your system is either fast enough to have them all the way up or slow enough so that you'll need them completely down. These settings can all be tweaked within the game (see below).

Click the "Advanced..." button at the bottom of this menu to bring up the Advanced Options menu.

Under "Emergency Repair Features", there are a few options which can help fix problems.

-Force textures to fit in video memory - This technique will allocate video memory for the textures automatically. In most cases this will speed up the game, but visual quality may be slightly degraded.

-Terrain Detail - This option will default to the technique best supported by your video card. If MCM2 is being displayed wrong or it is crashing, etc., try setting this to a different method. If you are sure your video card supports single pass multitexturing, set this to single for best performance.

-Current 3-D Renderer Selection - Set this to your primary 3D graphics card. Afterward you can uncheck the box, disabling the feature that prompts you to select a video card to use with the game every time you start it.

-Graphics Quality - This option can be tweaked in-game, so unless you are certain of how your video card will perform, skip this option and continue reading.

Once you are in a game of Motocross Madness 2, hit f on the keyboard to show the frame rate. Watch these nunmbers as you play the game. If the numbers stay over 30 most of the time, the game is plenty smooth enough and the graphics probably don't need to be tweaked (for performance). In MCM2, actually, 25 FPS or so seems rather smooth. Still, the graphics can be adjusted for more detail as long as the frame rate stays consistent. Any time the frame rate drops below 30 or so, the human eye will notice it is not as smooth as it should be. So if the frame rate is too low, decrease the detail in a scene in hopes of increasing the frame rate.

A couple in-game options will not affect the performance of the game, but they can still be handy. Hit F4 during a game to turn on or off visual cues. These are the arrows or other directions that assist you. The F5, F6, and F7 keys turn on or off radar, the stats, and the instruments.

-Sky - Hit F8 to toggle the detailed sky. When enabled, the sky will look detailed, but the game may run slightly slower. Here's a visual comparison:

Sky on:

Sky off:

-Particles - The F9 key toggles particles. If enabled, smoke and dirt are displayed. This can be costly for performance but produces a great effect. The performance hit seems to be about one to three FPS (frames per second). Here is a comparison:

Particles off:

Particles on:

-Shadows - The F10 key toggles shadows. If enabled, all 3D objects will cast shadows. This looks somewhat unrealistic and can affect performance by about 10%, so it can be disabled on slower PCs. Here is a comparison:

Shadows off:

Shadows on:

-Overall Graphics Quality - The F11 and F12 keys can increase or decrease the graphics quality. This changes a variety of options, including the detail levels of objects and the distance to which they stay detailed. Adjust this until the frame rate is greater than 30 and you are satisfied with the visual quality. F11 decreases quality, while F12 increases quality. Here is a comparison:

Quality = 10:

Quality = 5:

Quality = 1:

Notice that detailed buildings lose shape and sharpness, and the horizon moves closer as the quality drops.

Remember to check your frame rate as you change these settings. Pay attention to the average as you move around and encounter different objects in the game.

This isn't a performance tweak, but it's a simple option that many people neglect. Using the number pad on the right side of the keyboard, the camera angle can be completely customized. Hit "5" to cycle through the various views. Hit "0" to drop off the camera to demo in front of it, or hit "0" again to switch back to normal mode. The 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys will rotate the camera on the x and y-axis. "Home" zooms in, "End" zooms out. Also, "-" and "+" zoom out/in.

Ive had hours of fun with this game and it has been worth every penny, the cost of a 465 4stroke Yamaha would set you back a few T-bird chips and quite a few killer videocards of choice thats for sure, cheap fun!!!