Why so much lagging?

[beedubaya]

In FarCry, when I get to the regulator level, there is tremendous lagging at the beginning. I am running the game at 1024x768, All settings maxed except for shadows which are medium, 6X AA and 16X AF. In that hangar, I am getting in the low 20s for framerate. My min FPS was 18. This should not be happening with my video card. I read somewhere that FarCry was designed to only be played at max on hardware that is not yet available. Please give me advice on this. Thanks in advance.

 

[xxdryicexx]

Its not your comp, definitly no yuor comp. its the engine of farcry. it is sloppy and gives fps/lockup issues to even the best of computers..

the engine is just sloppy.. poeple wiht top of the line computers lag like crazy on it with onyl 20-30 people servers..

 

[beedubaya]

Yeah, it seems like many people, especially ATI people have had some kind of trouble with it.

 

[zerozero]

reduce your 2 cpu hogs (AA and AF). get your AA to 2 or 4 and same for your AF then increase resolution to 1280 X 1024. Make sure that in the ATI control panel, the box for game preference is set and adjust your settings from the game option menu. Also, make sure that the Vsync is off.
As I wrote on another post, here is a way to get a few more fps:

Launch the game then hit alt+tab to go to windows;
enter your task manager (ctrl+alt+del) and locate farcry process
right click on it and increase priority to high.
return to game and enjoy.

You might also want to make sure that there are no unneeded programs running in the background.
I played that game with my system and never dropped below the 25 fps mark at those settings.

 

[Demalii]

AF actually doesn't affect your FPS nearly as much as AA does, you're more than welcome to keep your AF up, as I do the same without loose but a few FPS, AA is off though =(. The only time I lost a major amount of fps was on the last level, when I was on that damn volcano thing... Man, there was lava flyin' everywhere and my game just got sloppy as hell. Like I seriously think it went down to 20fps. Beedubaya, I think it's just that your AA is up so high. Reviews on the xt card say "Now you can have no fear of playing some games with AAx2 on!" Which means that would totally cut farcry out of the no fear idea hehe... if you put AAx2 I bet you'll be running 30 fps at the lowest on the level you're at in farcry.

*edit* on a side note, if you have enough ram, running programs in the background are fine... typically it will all be held in the ram without anything being written to the hard drive. If the game you're playing wants more ram, everything that needs to will be written onto the hard drive (background programs). And that will slow you down.

 

[beedubaya]

That worked. I have lowered AA to 2x and have left AF at 16X, and now I don't feel like I am watching a slideshow (it wasn't quite that bad, but still). The jaggies are a little more noticable, but there still nothing compared to the jaggies on the PS2 console everyone raves about, so I can deal with it.

 

[zerozero]

increase your screen resolution to 1280 X 1024 and it will be even better

 

[beedubaya]

Come to find out, it wasn't the AA at all. Even with the AA turned down, I still had problems at the end of the regulator level (10 FPS - With an X800!!) I googled and found out that everybody was raving about how smoothly farcry ran on their 9800s and X800s. Therefore, I figured I had a video card problem. I almost started a thread called "Visiontek X800 SUCKS!"..lol. I went back into the ATI control panel to review my settings again, and found that disabling ATI's TRUEFORM did the trick. I turned my AA back up and the game plays beautifully.

P.S. What exactly does TRUEFORM do? Excuse my ignorance.

 

[zerozero]

In games which implement trueform (Morrowind, CS, Return to castle wolfenstein) , graphics are supposed to be smoother. It was a form of automatic tessalation which is better handled by software in DX9 so I don't think that new games will come out with this function since it requires more script and programming for no apparent gain. Vertex and pixel shaders accomplish the same thing in a simpler fashion.
Since it is hardware implemented, it is very demanding on your GPU therefore the lag created.

 

[beedubaya]

I just downloaded patch 1.1 for FarCry, which was quite a task on my P.O.S. dial-up connection. Now, I can play with all settings maxed out and my FPS is as smooth as butter (lowest being around 40). Now this is what I expected when I bought an X800. Thanks for all the help, guys.