Windows XP, 256 Mb DDR266, 40 Gb IBM 60GXP, Athlon 1333, GeForce 3. Reasonable system, right? Castle Wolfenstein doesn't seem to think so. With all detail options on full, the game runs perfectly smoothly, but takes ages to load and ages to quit too. It's so slow to load in fact (maybe 40 seconds) that everyone else has already started by the time a new map is called by a server and a few kills have taken place. Occassionally a good player will have had time to run to the first objective and already have placed dynamite. Anyone have any suggestions (without taking the detail down)? UDMA 5 is enabled and nothing else is running in the background BTW.
Excessive hard disk activity with Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- Thread starter RolyL
- Start date
I had this problem too with 256 MB of RAM in my system. I stuck another 256 MB of RAM in and the problem went away.
All you can do is buy more memory -- when you see hard drive activity during the game, it's either some background process doing something (doubtedly), the game is reading additional files from the hard drive, the game is writing data to the hard drive, or the biggest cause of them all.... swapping.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, swapping happens when the game needs to use more memory than your computer can offer, and then Windows saves a part of RAM that is used the least onto the hard drive, freeing that chunk of RAM and making it available to the requesting program. The game may run choppy and slow while the computer is reading or writing to the hard drive.
Thankfully, memory is cheap enough nowadays to painlessly afford 512 MB or even more.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, swapping happens when the game needs to use more memory than your computer can offer, and then Windows saves a part of RAM that is used the least onto the hard drive, freeing that chunk of RAM and making it available to the requesting program. The game may run choppy and slow while the computer is reading or writing to the hard drive.
Thankfully, memory is cheap enough nowadays to painlessly afford 512 MB or even more.
<< I've only got a PIII600 and have never had any hd activiity. I do have 512mb of ram though. Add another 256 and it'll probably go away. >>
The speed of the processor doesn't have any effect on swapping.
bunker
Lifer
- Apr 23, 2001
- 10,572
- 0
- 71
<<
<< I've only got a PIII600 and have never had any hd activiity. I do have 512mb of ram though. Add another 256 and it'll probably go away. >>
The speed of the processor doesn't have any effect on swapping. >>
I know, but he mentioned his processor, so I was trying to let him know that.
Thanks for the thoughts guys. It occurred to me that paging was to blame, but I was surprised at the fact that it did this so noticeably with 256 Mb RAM. Heaven knows what it would be like with only 128 or even 64.
Two more Wolfie questions whilst we're at it:
1) How does one prevent Anisotropic filtering from turning itself off each time the video engine is restarted?
2) Is it me or is the in-game server browser a bit on the pants side? Favourites have an annoying habit of disappearing (if appearing at all), and the catalogue downloaded from the master server list changes in size wildly in a very short space of time.
1) How does one prevent Anisotropic filtering from turning itself off each time the video engine is restarted?
2) Is it me or is the in-game server browser a bit on the pants side? Favourites have an annoying habit of disappearing (if appearing at all), and the catalogue downloaded from the master server list changes in size wildly in a very short space of time.
).to speed up map loading times, turn OFF texture compression (from the menu). only advised if you have a 64mb graphics card.
dunno about SP but this works very very well for MP, i am now first into about 90% of games, its not unknown for me to capture the forward depolyment area in the sub level when several people are still loading the map.
other things to do are adjust the memory allocated to RtCW, see the readme.txt (IMPORTANT!) that comes with the game, but note, what is doesnt say is any settings you apply to SP do not take effect in MP, you have to do it there too. RtCW allocates itself 72mb in SP and a pathetic 52mb in MP, if you have 256mb up it to maybe 128mb for BOTH, certainly you should change MP to use at least 72mb.
"without taking the detail down"
- dont be daft, take down the detail for MP, even I do this and my system pretty damn good (see link in sig). you dont have to do it a lot, just a couple of things. 3 things you wont even notice, that will improve performance and/or conenction, is hit ~ (actually, the key in top left of keyb, under escape, ¬ for UK kerboards), for the command prompt and type:
/cg_brasstime 0 -this just tells it not to bother drawing the empty bullet casings.
/cg_shadows 0 -takes away shadows, noticable performance increase and shadows dont help you anyway.
/s_musicvolume 0 -turns OFF (as opposed to right down) music, noticable performance increase. you dont get music in MP anyway except when looking at servers and at end of map.
dunno about SP but this works very very well for MP, i am now first into about 90% of games, its not unknown for me to capture the forward depolyment area in the sub level when several people are still loading the map.
other things to do are adjust the memory allocated to RtCW, see the readme.txt (IMPORTANT!) that comes with the game, but note, what is doesnt say is any settings you apply to SP do not take effect in MP, you have to do it there too. RtCW allocates itself 72mb in SP and a pathetic 52mb in MP, if you have 256mb up it to maybe 128mb for BOTH, certainly you should change MP to use at least 72mb.
"without taking the detail down"
- dont be daft, take down the detail for MP, even I do this and my system pretty damn good (see link in sig). you dont have to do it a lot, just a couple of things. 3 things you wont even notice, that will improve performance and/or conenction, is hit ~ (actually, the key in top left of keyb, under escape, ¬ for UK kerboards), for the command prompt and type:
/cg_brasstime 0 -this just tells it not to bother drawing the empty bullet casings.
/cg_shadows 0 -takes away shadows, noticable performance increase and shadows dont help you anyway.
/s_musicvolume 0 -turns OFF (as opposed to right down) music, noticable performance increase. you dont get music in MP anyway except when looking at servers and at end of map.
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