Deus Ex 2 giving me choppy video playback

[BrokenVisage]

I decided to check out Deus Ex: Invisible War yesterday and installed it on my Gaming Maching (see sig) expecting to have no problems with maxing out the video options since it came back in December '03. Even after installing the patch for it I get choppy playback while moving around in the environment, I don't get it. HL2 and D3 gives me no problems at all. I have to drop the resolution to 10x7 to maintain a stable flow, and even with that during some non-intensive momments I see my FPS sag considerably. Any suggestions?

 

[Emultra]

Deus Ex: Invisible War is, unfortunately, very poorly optimized. My A64 3200+ Winnie, 1024MB Corsair and ASUS N6600GT can't run it too well either. It's not the hardware's fault.

 

[CP5670]

This game evidently runs like garbage on almost every hardware setup out there. To improve performance a bit, go into the user.ini file in the My Documents\Deus Ex - Invisible War folder and set multisampling to 0 (doesn't appear to be any difference between 0 and 1 but this does speed things up). Turn down the shadow quality to medium as well. It runs pretty smoothly for me with these changes, but only at 1024x768 and that's with a 6800GT at 415/1100mhz. The 16-pipe X800 cards are your best option here, although even they don't play it too well.

 

[Emultra]

Exactly what .cfg file is it? There are many, and I haven't found one with the name "user.cfg" in it.

 

[pulsedrive]

Do you have the patch installed? I had this same problem when it first came out and the patch fixed a lot of the choppy problems it had.

 

[raystorm]

I can't help you with your problem as the game ran fine for me with the latest patch. Maybe its a driver thing?

In any case if you do happen to get the game running well you should use the fantastic high res texture pack by John P. (he also did Thief 3)

Here's his site:

Deus Ex: IW high res textures

 

[CP5670]

sorry, I meant user.ini. Notepad doesn't seem to read parts of the file correctly, but it opens up fine for me in Ultraedit.

 

[Emultra]

No such file in the main directory.

As for Thief III, I believe it is slightly better optimized, though not as well as for example the way Painkiller runs so well.

 

[CP5670]

I think you're looking in the wrong place; it should be in the "My Documents\Deus Ex - Invisible War" subdirectory, not the main game folder. This is one of these games that puts its savegames and configuration files in a different place than the main game directory.

 

[Emultra]

Hmm, it has been removed due to a Windows reinstall. Thanks for the help though, I'll make sure I set it to 0 after game reinstall.

 

[BrokenVisage]

Can you tell me which variable represents multisampling in the ini file? I tried searching for it but came up with nothing, is it something obscure?