Flash and skip during gameplay

[Jaresk]

Almost every time I change map, the screen flash. To fix it, I just toggle the quality, but it just fix it for the round. Can I fix that problem permanently?

Also, At any time, the game skip every second which affect my performance, especially with the Nex. This also happens in the menu.

P.S.: I have Windows XP.

Thanks in advance!

[Urmel]

Err, quite hard to understand what you trying to tell us there. Nevermind.

Could you please tell us about your hardware, such as CPU, RAM size and the VGA adapter.

Second, start a local match (instant action or with "create"), open the console with <SHIFT+ESC> and type showfps 1 then close with <ESC>. Now you can see how many fps you get while playing. Tell us about it.

About the "flashing" display: please try to explain that more exactly. In case you are german and have problems with english, send me your problem by private message.

[Jaresk]

Ok, I'm slightly embarrassed about that but, I don't know how to find out what's my computer's CPU, Ram size and stuff like that. If you could tell me how to find out, it would be awesome. Sorry.

I've checked the FPS and it has an average of 50fps. When it skips, it go down to 40fps. Or is it a coincidence? I don't know...

And about the flashing... I can still play while it does it; it goes from the game screen to a black screen very fast hence it flash's black not white. It almost feels like I'm playing and blinking very fast. There are also black horizontal lines that goes up and down at a irregular speed. I noticed that it's worst in the Pause menu screen for some reason.

I forgot to mention a, probably crucial, detail in the last post. I already had an unfixed problem with another game for that reason. I have Laptop. Anyway, tell me if there anything missing.

P.S.: I'm not German nor English, I'm French(Canada) but I learned English and if the last post seemed a little, er, not good , It's because, for some reason, I was in a hurry! Sorry.

[Urmel]

Okay, quite easy how to find out about the hardware. Just press the Start-Button, choose "run" (whatever it is in another language, its the choice directly above the "shutdown" one. Type dxdiag into the command line and enter. The coming window shows up about the CPU and the RAM. If you press the third tab (something like "video"), you'll find information about your graphics adapter.

[Jaresk]

Don't worry about translating problems. Although I'm French, My computer is 95% English. I don't like the French computer terms.

502MB RAM

I don't see CPU anywhere but I founded out that CPU stance for Central Processing Unit, so this is what's under Processor:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz

The third tab was display, but I can't find any VGA adapter or graphic adapter. Alternatively, if there any ways, I could take a print screen of the tab and send it to you...

[Urmel]

Okay, RAM size tells me you've got an onboard VGA chip with shared memory, which is not very pleasant for gaming

If you are curious about it, just take a look at the preferences of display by right-clicking your desktop. You'll find the type of onboard VGA there if the driver is installed correctly.

However, for a system like that you've got a fuckin awesome performance. What you could do is entering the system setup of the laptop to assign more RAM to the VGA and increase the graphics power that way, but don't expect too much. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.

[Jaresk]

What you could do is entering the system setup of the laptop to assign more RAM to the VGA and increase the graphics power that way

Sorry if I'm a burden but how do I do that? I tried doing it myself but I guess I can't.

[Urmel]

Well I'm sorry, I hardly can help you there cause that depends on the laptop you've got there. You could take a look at the manual, and if you don't have one, see the support pages of the manufacturer.

[iSuck]

The same thing happened to me on my friends HP-mini. It's a cheap HP, so that probably explains it. Is there a way to actually fix it?

[Urmel]

Well, this mainly depends on the graphics chip itsself. There are very weak ones that don't even support any 3D acceleration (like most of the SiS chips), some support it, but still are very very weak. Especially openGL based games are problematic with onboard chips.

IMO the flickering display are due to the slow shared memory on one hand, on the other hand it's small size of RAM which gets even smaller when you assign more RAM to the graphics chip. That's probably also the reason for fps drops while playing.

So the first step you can do is check out which chip you exactly have, upgrade your RAM and then check out for new resp. faster drivers. There are a few websites about tweaking onboard graphics. So when you optimized your hardware, you can go on tweaking the Nexuiz settings.

Extremely hard work. And as it's almost impossible for most Laptops to get a VGA upgrade, it's much better to have an eye on the hardware before buying it. My Dell Laptop is 4 years old, has only 512MB RAM and a Radeon 9000, but the Radeon has 64MB of its own RAM, and that's enough to play fluently with up to 90fps. Well, it wasnt that cheap when new