1862837

Dynamic Glows

March 11th, 2005 02:57 PM

I am able to run Dynamic Glows in multiplayer, however the performance is quite low. Here are my system specs:

Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz processor
Geforce 3 Ti 200 128 MB video card
1.0 GB RAM

That exceeds the recommended requirements for JA, so should I not be able to smoothly run the game at high resolutions with dynamic glows?

Without dynamic glows, I can run up to 1024 x 768 at a max FPS rate of 90.
With it, my FPS drops to about 30-40. Perhaps there are drivers that could rectify this issue.

Do any technical people have an idea?

1863105

Re: Dynamic Glows

March 11th, 2005 05:23 PM

Dynamic glow is infamous throughtout the JKO/A and Quake type engines for knocking the fps right down, as you have noticed. If you run a lot of the custom maps you will find that with dynamic lights, even with your specs, some maps are almost unplayable because fps can end up going down to single figures.

The stats you quote are pretty darn good. I have a P4 2.66 Ghz, 512MB RAM, GeF 5950 256 MB (AGP), ( a card with lots of rendering channels, and way, way ahead of yours in capabilities), and I find my stats are probably about the same as yours. It is all down to the way the software engine handles the dynamic glow effect. If you are running the latest WHQL signed drivers for your card, (go to www.nvidia.com and check out), then there is not too much you can do. If you are not running the latest, then upgrading may give you a few extra fps, but not very much, really. It is not really a driver issue.

The only way you are not going to notice such a knock down effect, is to play JKA with the top of the range PCI express equivalent graphics card. This is cutting edge technology in graphics with many many more channels available to render dynamic graphics, but then this also requires a still more cutting edge motherboard. Some mobos are now being made with the facility to have dual processor systems with dual graphics cards.....but now we are getting into the realms of animations and rendering for cinema.

Take it from me, people are never happy with their graphics card, and you just become obsessed with the fps issue. You could get a better card for your Mobo like mine, but you would only see the improvement in playing much more modern games such as Far Cry, with not a lot of improvement in JKA.

The other thing which will make a difference to your on screen experience of JKA, or any game is whether you hae a TFT screen or a good CRT monitor. It is only comparitively recently that TFT screen response times have come down to 10ms and less, This also makes for a smoother graphics experience. There are still a lot of people trying to use TFT monitors with response times in the 20's msecs. In comparison, A good quality CRT monitor at a refresh rate of 70-85GHz still rivals a TFT for smoothness of gameplay or video playback when both use the same resolution setting simply because the response time on a CRT tube is much faster than a TFT Monitor.