| Multiplayer : Load times *EXTREMELY* Excessive [message #131156] |
Thu, 06 January 2005 22:56  |
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mildaine
Messages: 15
Registered: June 2003
Karma: 0
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Recruit |
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Allright. Here's the deal.
Renegade has extremely long loading times for levels. Loading times are in excess of 3-5 minutes. When I had switched to windows to my task manager to monitor memory usage; I noticed the game seems to never use more than 80mb of main memory. Occasionaly during play, the game will us up to 90mb of main memory. This doesn't make sense; I have 512mb of PC3200. Amount of free physiical ram is roughly 250-300mb when running idle on desktop. What I don't understand is why renegade chooses not to use more memory than the minimum running specification (96mb). Wether this is a problem that resides in the programming, or my drivers, or even windows - I have no idea where to start looking.
I have searched all over the forums for similar problems; and I have come across a few people with the exact same problem, yet no viable solution has been brought to light.
I am quite sure that it is not related to the hardware or the hardware controlling it (Direct SATA, SCSI PCI card, or otherwise). However; I do suspect it may be a problem with how Renegade manages main memory, or on the other side of the spectrum - it may also be Windows XP interfering with some of the functions the game requires.
My system specs :
iBASE MB870 Pentium 4 Mini-ITX
ATi RS300m Integrated Radeon 9180 8X AGP 64mb
ATi IXP150 Integrated SATA Controller
RealTek LAN NIC Integrated
RealTek Audio Integrated
Seagate SATA 120GB "Barricuda"
512mb PC3200; 2.5 CL, 64mb Shared for UMA frame buffer (454 mb available for main memory)
Windows XP Professional SP2 & All security updates.
Bare minimum amount of TSR's loaded in background.
If anyone may have some insight to this problem, I would greatly appreciate the feedback. Positive suggestions only please.
Thank you.
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| Multiplayer : Load times *EXTREMELY* Excessive [message #131194] |
Fri, 07 January 2005 11:04  |
flyingfox
Messages: 1612
Registered: February 2003
Location: scotland, uk
Karma: 0
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General (1 Star) |
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About the hard drive thing, I think I understand what you are saying but did not know a hard drive ever required a driver set.
I have never used windows XP but it sounds like maybe windows is reserving too much memory for other applications and/or it thinks 96mb is all you need for the game?
here's a small suggestion, it probably won't do much good:
Go to your device manager (a right click of my computer) and find your hard drive on 'disk drives'. properties, go to its settings and check the DMA box which is direct memory access. also enable this on your CD drives. you then need to restart your computer for it to change.
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| Multiplayer : Load times *EXTREMELY* Excessive [message #131233] |
Fri, 07 January 2005 15:46 |
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I miysef running a RAID, and theres no difference if its a SCSI RAID or IDE RAID, nor Level 0, Level 1 or Level 0+1. 
All this slows renegade down for a reason I never understood, so I copied Rengade to my old 2Gig SCSI HD amd that reduced loadngspeed from 5-8 minutes to about 30 seconds.
The loadingspeed is highly effected by the Harddrive speed, so maybe a Virus, a backround program or what ever eats up your HD performance.
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"Don't say it is imposible... just find a solution!"
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| Multiplayer : Load times *EXTREMELY* Excessive [message #131266] |
Fri, 07 January 2005 19:22 |
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mildaine
Messages: 15
Registered: June 2003
Karma: 0
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Uh .. right. Well, It just happens to be that the SCSI controller is in the south bridge integrated. (150mhz). However, the RAID / SCSI mode does function in IDE, if only I had two ide slots. Refer to the manufacturer's webpage for iBASE MB870 motherboard if your interested. I do not use a traditional PCI card; and it wouldn't really make much sense if I did, since the drive is designed only to operate at one interface speed : 150mhz. (300mbit/s)
Yes, my hard drive is SCSI based. But what I failed to tell you is that I my hard drive is an SATA drive, and it cannot run RAID mode while SCSI mode is enabled. There is only the option for either or, but not both. If RAID mode is enabled, my system will not detect the SATA drive at all.
To put this perspective for you; it is not the hardware; or the settings in bios. Even if RAID mode was enabled and I did have a second SATA drive, it would not slow the game down one bit. RAID is just as fast as a single drive than redundant drives. The rest of the computer has no idea that there are two hard drives simply because RAID has one rule : There 's no asynchronous mode. The drives operate as one device; and share the exact same I/O resources, except within the controller itself of course. It kinda defeats the purpose of RAID if there was.
Whatever problems you were getting was not hardware related, rather, the way the game was interacting with Windows and it's resources.
A virus? I don' think so. I did a scan just after you suggested it, however.
All my other games run perfecetly fine, so does the rest of the system.
I've never known any video game to directly access hardware on it's own, ESPECIALLY since APi's Like DirectX do this for you nowadays (Saving video game developers alot of time and resources on developing their own APi)
I can assure you, the problem isn't with the hardware. It's software related.
And im betting that it's how Renegade is trying to tell the core how to read the game data.
Thanks for the input... Appreciate your help =)
Anyone else have any brilliant ideas?
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| Multiplayer : Load times *EXTREMELY* Excessive [message #133441] |
Sat, 22 January 2005 06:53 |
2000_years
Messages: 102
Registered: November 2003
Karma: 0
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Have you got an old IDE hdd you can plug in to test? I have basically the same setup as you (AXP 2500+, R9800, SATA HDD connected via PCI card (but mine is a Maxtor 120gb)
Every other game loads and functions perfectly, but Renegade would take about 3 minuites to load. It would then run quite choppy when-ever I did something new (like going into a PT, getting into a tank for the first time, etc)
Someone else suggested to move it onto an old IDE drive and I thought "wow, what good will that do?" gave it a try, and it seems fine now. Still runs like a bag of shit loading it from the SATA drive.
I know you'll probably go on to blame CBP1 or Renguard or god knows what else, but give it a try
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