Tales of Monkey Island and new computer

Polychrome

Having trouble running TOMI on a new computer. Ran great on a single core AMD 3200 with an Nvidia that had a half gig of RAM.

A few months ago, I went and grabbed myself a new Asus with a hex-core AMD (Phenom 2), 8 gigs of RAM, Radion 5450 with it's own gig of RAM, etc. This system was purchased mainly for playing Aion, and so that I could shamelessly multitask things like playing movies while playing Aion.

Aion runs great, and so do a lot of other games. TOMI runs terribly.

I've tried messing around with the GPU settings, setting affinity to a specific core, and stuff like that. I'm not getting very far. Even (*shudder*) lowering the graphics settings doesn't do much.

Any ideas?

DjNDB

What Graphics settings did you try?
I would start with setting Graphics quality to 1. If it runs well, increase it as long as it does. If it does not, reduce the Resolution. Also make sure you don't enforce Antialiasing in your driver settings.


The Radeon 5450 is a quite slow card, and since you don't seem to appreciate low quality graphics, you might want to consider exchanging it. It's definitely the weakest link in your otherwise powerful system. If you intend to play more 3D games, that card was not a good choice.

Can you use your previous graphics card instead?
Otherwise i would try to get a refund on it, and buy a more powerful graphics card.

ForumPoster

You know the 5450 is a huge bottleneck in that system, right? It's a basic entry-level GPU with a performance level that would only have been particularly impressive in 2004. Even if it's not the cause of the problem it's going to cause you problems sooner or later considering how far it lags behind your processor and RAM. Oh, and believe me, with performance that slow attaching 1GB of RAM to that GPU is like attaching a spoiler to a push-bike.

Cyphox

come on, the 5450 isn't THAAAAT bad, is it?

ForumPoster

'fraid so, it performs about as well as the old X700, lagging a long way behind even the 5650 which in turn has a noticable performance gap to the 5750 which is about half as fast as the 5850. The gigabyte of video ram won't do anything to help that either as it's simply not fast enough to take advantage of it.

Cyphox

okay, i just googled a bit, so you can say the 5450 is just the same crap as the g210 from nvidia?

i dont know that much about ati-cards, when we're selling crappy cards at work, we're selling nvidia, lol

Hee Ho Ho

i disagree. what is the ati radeon 9700 64mb vs the the card in mention 1gb. obviously the 5 series is better but i had no problems with 9700. i would suggest update grafix drivers. update directx.

what you cpu speed? ghz

ForumPoster

We're not blaming the card's lack of speed solely for the issues, we weren't even trying to, but large disparity between GPU and CPU speed can create fairly serious slowdown and other problems as information gets stuck in a 'bottleneck'. The difference between a 6 core CPU of any description and a card as low-rent as the 5450 is more than enough. More, you really haven't been able to judge processors on their clock speed since the late 90s.

Again, I would also mention that judging a graphics card on the amount of V-Ram is misguided as the 5450 simply isn't fast enough to take advantage of the extra ram. Graphics card companies simply use it as a way to up-sell a weaker core more often than not. Even the 'special' overclocked versions of the 5450 out there with 1GB of ram tacked on gain at best a 2 - 3FPS advantage over the standard 512MB model, and that's almost exclusively due to the over-clocking. The weakest card I've seen be noticably hampered by 512MB vs 1024MB is the 3850 and that's a card that could eat the 5450 for breakfast.

(Series naming logic is tricky, I know, but the 5 series covers a large range because it's the first range of DirectX11 compatible GPUs ATI has put out and they wanted to cover all bases from workstation to high-end gaming rig.)

Hee Ho Ho

I agree it's a bad card but I don't think it's incapable of running ttgames. I would recommend simple fixes such as graphics drivers before costly changes such as buy a high end 4 series and forget dx11

ForumPoster

You really don't quite follow, I wasn't suggesting the card's speed is in any way inadequate for the job at hand, in fact I'm sure it is, I was commenting on bottlenecks between the CPU and GPU.

Hee Ho Ho

I'm a bit confused because you say the speed sufficient yet there is a bottleneck. Which I thought was because of speed could you please clarify

Thanks

Edit: in any case I still would update the graphics drivers before spending

Polychrome

The card I replaced here was new in 2006. I really think there's issues beyond the video card, especially since:

1. Telltale games *TYPICALLY* don't seem to require much to run, in my past experience
2. In every way I can think of, it was an upgrade to my old Nvidia.

I'm not the type to get into Nvida vs. Ati wars, so that wasn't the purpose behind the change. My intention with this particular purchase was to upgrade motherboard/ram/processor. I typically buy computers with the intention of cramming something better in later, but seriously, I doubt the video card is the issue in this particular case as it's been sufficient for *everything* else.

The kinds of hints/help I'm looking for are: Is there something in the ATI panel that might conflict with the game? Are there any other types of autosettings that are going to hurt more than they help? Known issues with certain driver builds? Stuff like that.

I'd just like to add that I jumped into a raid the other day. Raids in Aion are no less than huge, hundreds of rendered characters at once, and it barely dipped below 30. It lagged me to the point of crashing my router, but the graphics side of things held up perfectly with some really hilarious lag-bugs.

Hee Ho Ho

Ok, if we move away from grafix then I would say that intel multicore are better than amd multicore according to a bit of googling. Also, if ttgames are single core games then having a slow clock speed might affect this. I don't know for sure.

You have A very good system and I support both nvidia and ati

It is difficult to pinpoint the problem and the only non costly option I can think of directx update and graphics card software update

Edit: when I say update grafix I mean from ati site not sapphire or other companies

Polychrome

If we're wondering on clockspeed, each core is 2.7, which once again, would still be an upgrade from my previous system. :P

I tried downloading the new windows 7 version of the Catalyst software. Not much change. Trying to mess with the settings actually messes with the in-game textures, which probably takes more work than it saves, so I ditched it. Disabling Aero seems to get rid of the lag and slow responsiveness, but then I get frameskips instead. Ugh.

So far, the only things that seem to make a difference are running a lower resolution in a window. The running in a window difference makes me wonder if some sort of vertical sync thing is getting in the way...

Edit: Random pondering. Maybe I should move my second monitor to the on-board video card? I don't use it for anything 3d related anyway. I guess I'm just hesitating since it wasn't a problem before... Hmmm.

Edit2: *headdesk* Seems all my messing around managed to make Aion load faster. Come on, computer, now you're just playing favorites!

Hee Ho Ho

You're processor's brill. Drivers are top notch. I usually download the grafix seperate from the catalyst junk but that's just me. What resolution are you using and how many monitors? It's strange that it speeds up in windowed mode (assuming the res is the same) Im going to suggest right click properties compatibility and try xp? Perhaps you have the more expensive windows 7 and have xp mode you can try?

Edit; have you tried any other tell tale game? Perhaps a demo of Sam and max and see how that goes?