Hi sirs!
I live in Taiwan, and my ping is never under 250 (usually around 300), and every server is like this including the ones in Australia. and this is a first problem.

Second problem, I am now using this machine:

Athlon 1250 Mghz
Motherboard ECS Gameunion K7S7AG
RAM 768 Mb DDR
Graphic card Xabre Sis330 (64Mb)

And I dont even have a printer
FPS is around 27 ( ): what I don't know is if I can improve or not.

NOW the RESULT is just that I can't play: you get in, you are fragged in 54 frames (2 seconds) and feel "not so slow... but.. .how to say? Just too LATE"

I tried to improve the situation with some hints like:
gl_picmip #; r_restart
typed in the console, but nothing changes.
Of course, everything in the settings SEEMS to at minimum possible standards...
Some advice? (don't tell me change machine and country please!! )
Thanks a lot and true congratulations for this huge project to all the people workin' on it.
Ciao,

Marco - Panamon Rn+

[quote="panamon"]Graphic card Xabre Sis330 (64Mb)/quote]

That is your problem ... it's not a real (well atleast not a powerfull) 3D accelerator. If you buy any (new) ATI base or NVidia based (I don't know of any other) and turn the graphics to a minimum you should be able to run it.

About the ping ... well if you are connecting around the world ... there is just a physical limit to it ... So try to get peaple motivated at your side of the planet. And host your own server if needed.

The graphics card is likely to be the limiting factor in that machine. I assume you've already considered updating drivers for it. This topic lists graphics cards and what people think of them for Nexuiz:
http://www.forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=349

There are a couple of hacks that can be done on the content of the game to improve performance. This has been done for Tinynex which is a cut down Nexuiz but I don't think is up to date. The work to do this is pretty simple though so anyone with a few tools can do it themselves:
http://www.forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=504

As for ping, what sort of ping do you get in other games to servers in similar places? AFAIK there was a server in Japan and I was able to connect to it rather well once. It may be a local connection issue for you though.

A perhaps obvious thing is to run the low-end configuration, by typing

Code: Select all

exec low.cfg
vid_restart

in the console, or +exec low.cfg from the command line.
If that isn't enough, even an old and cheap radeon or geforce will run circles around the xabre.

As for the ping, well, unfortunately not much that can be done, other than trying to find players geographically close to you. If you have the bandwidth to spare, setting up a small public server might help attract players...

kyre wrote:If that isn't enough, even an old and cheap radeon or geforce will run circles around the xabre.

If you get an nvidia geforce 5 or 6 which should be cheap enough, it should do fine, I have a geforce 7 and it is probably too powerfull... (up to 500 FPS)

You can probably get a decent OEM one on ebay.

I am surprised and very happy for your support and quick help: thanks to all of you!

I have found FRANEK, the Japanese server, who gives me a good "ping 100", and I am pretty happy with it.

The Xabre... Well, the problem is that the Xabre is integrated in the Mainboard: that is, I can't just buy and add a new one: I have to buy a whole new machine
That's probably the thing I should do ^_^

What else can I give up (in terms of graphics) to obtain a decent 50pfs? Loweing the textures to minimum? Or abandon fullscreen or any other tips?

Otherwise I will have to frag you when my machine will improve
ehm...

Thanks again, really.

Marco - Panamon

Hi and welcome.

Actually I'm surprised that Nexuiz actually does run on your computer. We didn't do any testing on SiS Xabre cards - they're are basically unavailable here. I would have assumed that those cards wouldn't have a proper OpenGL implemenation.

Sure there's no PCI or AGP slot to fit in a new gfx card?

Motherboards with onboard graphics do not mean that you can not run another graphics card. There will always be a jumper somewhere to disable the onboard graphics. I remember doing this with a salvaged P90 with onboard 1Mb card to upgrade to the mighty Matrox Mystique.

Many motherboards with onbaord graphics won't give you an AGP slot though. This is because the onboard graphics uses up the AGP interface and although some boards allow you to use a separate AGP card, most won't. The PCI bus will limit performance slightly (I found a Geforce 256 to be ~25% slower under PCI than AGP 2x) but you could still get something better than you currently have.

The fastest PCI card is an ATI X1300 but they are very poor value and not that good for Nexuiz. There are quite a few Geforce FX 5200 (and some 5500) cards on PCI which would be the ultimate PCI card for Nexuiz. This still aren't very numerous and will cost a fair bit more than the Geforce 4 MX's which are available on PCI. This would be a bit quicker than your existing chip (Xabre 200?).

Does this look like your motherboard:
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/k7s7ag/k7s7agp1.htm

If so it's socket A which are now very cheap and almost all come with an AGP slot. It might be cheaper for you to buy a more recent Socket A motherboard and a cheap AGP card.

I once tried Nexuiz with a Geforce 2 MX PCI... and it was playable (about 30 fps) at lowest settings. But that's the absolute minimum...

I'm running an GeForce 5450 or summat, and it runs pretty well at the uttermost minimum settings (around 50-100 fps). Heh. Like the OP, I have trouble with ping because I am in New Zealand. The closest server is Australia, which gets fairly good ping (<100 ms), but it's never occupied and so I generally play at ~200-250 ms ping on US servers. Surprisingly, I have not found this a significant handicap except when playing very skilled opponents. I understand that the netcode compensates somewhat for the lag by making the hitbox of the opponent in effect a little larger—I've definitely noticed (:

I find it quite amusing how people fret over any change of fps over 30. Seriously, I dont think that humans can even observe anything over 30 fps— maybe a change between 30-50 is noticable, but I know I couldnt recognize anything above that.

Some games 20 is playable, even 15 (the average for most anime btw), IMHO.

This game ran at 6 fps lol:

3d Monster Maze

You're sort of right. Anything over 60 fps is fairly moot; very few people can tell the difference. But the difference between 60 and 30 is quite noticeable (dependent on game). I don't really worry about fps except out of habit—gotta hit that 43/60/75/120 maxfps consistently so as to get the best airspeed! Oh wait...

I really disagree. You might not really notice fps in the way of 'thats still a fluent animation or not' as the human eye is easily fooled by movement (even easier in the case of tv with its bad picture and motion blur). You are right with animation speeds but the eye can notice changes at much higher rates then 30fps. Take some animation and insert one frame that looks totaly different, you will at least notice it even with much higher speeds.

Also consider aiming: Someone shooting at you from behind, now you do a flick turn in half a second. Lets consider you have 30 fps and also that you turn in half a second (imo thats long for flick turn) that means that you will get 15 frames (half of 30) and thus your view will 'skip along' at 12° steps. You will notice those steps and it will not feel good. 30fps already feel very bad if you try to aim for things 'on your screen' aka within then 45° to your left/right.

The 66fps quake4 currently has hard coded are on the lower end of what i think are required fps for a fast online shooter. Personally i'd rather go for 80 to 'feel' good.

Well said. My suggestion of 60 fps is, as you point out, on the low side when it comes to smooth, fast motion on a high-refresh-rate display.

off topic but..
Dont forget framerate drops. This is the # 1 reason i try to keep my fps arround 100. considers you generally have 30 fps and are fine with it. suddenly things heat up, losts on players and fx in view and your fps drop by 15-20. IF you normaly have around 30 that leaves you with 10-15 fps. Add a fast turn on that.. no fun. Generaly ppl are also sensetive to changes in framerate, so limit you framerate to a reasonable number. (screen refresh + "some" seems a good idea for most rigs)

Without motion blurring, humans have no problem defecting framing at very high speeds. changes from black to white to black can be registered faster than 1/200 of a second, ie.. you'd see it even at 200 FPS. Test pilots can often even identify pitures in the white frame, and register changes faster than 1/1000 of a secondIt depends very much on the material you are observing. white-black-white changes must be very slow for you to see them for instance.

To achieve real smoothness in non motion-blurred data (as most games is) you need to get close to at least 100 FPS for most people.