BF2 - tech discussion

[NeilMcRae]

oh I meant to add, if you get the stutters whilst the EA GAmes Challenge everything is playing then its definately a sound issue.

[PeteJ]

I thought it could be my onboard sound too, but I've bought a new soundcard and it has made little difference.

I get serious stuttering for the first few minutes if running at max detail (completely unplayable), but then it is silky smooth. If I turn the detail down to lowest it runs fine instantly. I shall try disabling my soundcard and see if that does make a difference, but I suspect it is memory (I have 1gig ram).

[John Beaulieu]

try this:

turn textures to medium
turn dynamic lighting and shadows to off

looks like **** (especially inside buildings) but it gave me a 25-30fps boost (could run at 75fps solidly, spiking at around the 90 mark. it dropped when i popped a smoke grenade to around 50fps. it also gives a more than unfair advantage in buildings since the enemy can no longer hide in the shadows

personally i only tried this setting to see if it did make a huge difference as i had read, i will run it with everything on high except for lighting. and take the stutters at the beginning of maps, and the longish loading times (when i played the other night, the enemy were at my base before i even spawned at the start of one round) ... that is until i put in the 2 gig of twinned ram i have on the way

interested to know what everyones setups are with this game and what fps they are getting (fraps is a better indicator than the in-game counter (renderer. drawfps 1))

[PeteJ]

I am planning on getting 2gig also, but sadly my PC only supports two sticks so it means dumping my 2x512.

My PC should technically run the game maxed out with no problems. It sounds daft, but I really want it to run better than it does now, so I'm desperate to find out what the problem is

[Mr Pump]

You might want to check this

http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST--2147-x-x-x

They seem to reckon that going from 1-2gig isn't such a great performance boost.

[The Boatman]

Kotatsu, there is a fix for the video playback bug with the newest nV drivers over at www.nvnews.net - you just have to tweak the digital vibrance.

[John Beaulieu]

Mr Pump - going from 1 gig to 2 gig will help out with the 'stutters' caused by hdd activity - a full map has a memory footprint of between 800 meg and 1.5 gig (according to some sources) so every bit of extra memory will help

[PeteJ]

Yeah that Gamepost feature is a little misleading (surprise surprise) - notice they state that their figures "don't tell the whole story", yet don't actually explain any further.

I think more ram would help the loading quite a bit, and the initial few minutes. I've now cut down the detail slightly (Dynamic lighting and shadows to medium) and it is now pretty smooth throughout. The first few seconds are choppy but I can live with that.

One thing I've done which helped ever so slightly - as found on another forum - is to do the following:
Finalise your graphics settings and quit out of BF2. Go to c:\documents and settings\<your profile>\battlefield2\mods\bf2\chache - delete everything in here. Reload BF2 and start up a map - this will reoptimise the shaders, and create just one folder in the cache directory. Close down again and defrag.

Every time you change the graphics settings it creates a new folder, and apparently this can cause the loading to slowdown. I've not noticed much difference, but anything is an improvement

[John Beaulieu]

tweak guide here which may help

[Zanza]

I was having terrible splutters when I started, im only running a 6600gt, and a Athlon 2000+ processor. It ran fine when I was in 800x600 and everything on low, but I wasnt happy with running it on the lowest settings, I wanted HIGH!!!!

My solution to the problem was:

Turn off harware support and acceleration in windows advanced sound options.
Turn direct x sound acceleration to off in the directxsetup
Set battlefields sound option to software and on a low setting, removing the addition creative sound thingy option.
Increase the memory priorty level in windows to 'above normal'


my game runs near perfect in 1024x768 with everything on high, except for dynamic shadows and lighting which are set to low. \o/

[AlwaysAce]

but with ****ty sounds

[Zanza]

really? Mine still sounds fantastic tbh.

[Mr Pump]

Just upped my memory to 1.5gigs. Lets see what that does then

[Lebowski]

I've got an AMD64 3200+, Nvidia GT6800, and 512mb ram and for some reason i was getting really bad results with my graphics card pretty much had to have everything on low or medium, i upped the ram to a GIG tweaked a few of the graphic card settings and it sorted out all my problems with this game, it really dose need that gig of ram.

i can all of the graphics settings on full now and the dynamic lighting on high and it looks like a totally different game, i tried fraps on it and got some very good results runs silky smooth with a very good frame rate now.

[Corrupt Rose]

I've got an AMD64 32000+...

How much did that monster set you back?