Diablo 2 very sluggish on my machine. Any tweak tips?

[Nullity]

Hi, I'm trying to play Diablo 2 on a new computer I have just built. The specs are:

K6-3+ 450
Asus P5A
256mb PC133
Asus GeForce256 DDR Delux
Creative Labs SB Live! Value
Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore 8x + Creative Labs decoder card
Creative Labs 12x10x32

I've tried using both Direct3d and DirectDraw and both get no more than 25 FPS. When I encounter monsters, it can crawl down to less than 10 FPS.

I have DirectX 7.0a and the latest Asus GeForce drivers.

I have basically the same setup except I have a Voodoo3 3000 and only 128mb PC100 and it runs smooth on that one.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[jonnyjack]

hey,

who are you building this computer for? and what's the status on the WD hard drive? i already bought a maxtor hd for my uncle cause i needed to finish his computer...

bump for a friend...

 

[Pocatello]

I think Diablo II runs best with a voodoo board.

 

[Taz4158]

You do have a large CPU bottleneck with that rig.

 

[Bignate603]

hmm, Diablo 2 runs deent on my pentium200... Itshould runwell. You're way over spec. Try turning off the 3d effects and see what's up. Also, get the newest drivers for everything, especially your geforce

 

[Deeko]

Diablo 2 runs by far the best on glide. It runs perfectly smooth on my V5 in glide, but gets choppy in D3D. It just isn't written well for the other modes, and I found that directdraw runs faster than D3D, but doesn't look any worse, so on my family computer with integrated intel crap, I run it in Directdraw, it seems to be better than D3D.

 

[LordSandMan]

There is a big difference between the Pentium II and the K6-3. The K6 family isn't a good processor for gaming. The Duron would have been a better choice.

What processor do you have in the Voodoo 3 system???

Be sure you have all of the latest drivers for the mobo installed. This can make a huge difference.

 

[hadoken]

Faster Hard Drive. Diablo 2 accesses the HD a lot, even with a lot of ram.

 

[Soccer55]

I believe that D2 was originally written for glide and then Blizzard added D3D support later. That is why glide is better than D3D. As for running it in directdraw mode, I believe the only difference would be that the spell effects look better in D3D because the rest of the effects in the game use sprites (I could be wrong though). The reason you are only seeing a max of 25 fps is because I heard that 25 fps is the maximum that the game allows. I'm not sure if there is a hack of some sort to allow for higher fps, but I think 25 is the max no matter how powerful the system. Also, LordSandman is right, your CPU is the bottleneck of the system for this game. I would recommend switching to DirectDraw mode because it should run a lot better for you. Good luck and have fun playin

-Tom

 

[Nullity]

Both computers have K6-3's in them. Its not the CPU because I tried installing Diablo 2 on a computer with a K6-2 350mhz with a Banshee and it runs perfectly fine with glide. I just think its glide and direct3d now. I'll use DirectDraw.

Thanks for all your replies.

Null