Help! Serious Sam 2 runs slow like a rock!!!

[MyChemEGirl]

Help. I have installed serious sam the second encounter on various computers but it always runs slow like 10 fps. I run windows 98 se. usually the system has 128mb to 196ram. i tried swithing from geforce2 mx 400 to radeon 7500 on celeron 417, 600, 800 and pentium2 450 and p3 500. no matter what combination, it always runs clunky. please help.the first one was superfun and i really want to play the second one. thanks.

 

[BFG10K]

What game resolution and detail levels are you using? Try 640 x 480 x 16 and if your scores increase a lot then it's your video card that can't handle the settings you're giving it. Also be sure try to a few other OpenGL games to check how the performance is in them.

And make sure you have the latest BIOS, video card drivers and chipset drivers for your system.

 

[alexruiz]

Serious Sam requires a hefty amount of power, and the fastest the CPU the better graphics. Also, Sam has no optimizations, so more x87 FPU power helps a lot. The second encounter in far more demanding than the first.... My former duron 700 + GeForce2 MX ran the first game at 40 fps average in 1024x768x32..... However, with the second encounter I was barely above 25 fps average at the same resolution.
Go to the Serious Sam forums for more help about the game.

http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~serioussam/forums/

By the way, great game, the best IMHO.

 

[tazdevl]

Agreed, SS SE is a CPU intensive game, mighty fun though. There is an issue with ATI drivers and the game. I have a retail 8500 and XP 1800 @ 1.72MHZ with 768 MB of RAM and it stutters like a old man with Alzheimers on crack at times. There is a later set of drivers out that addresses the issue. I suggest you head over to Rage3D.com and download the latest beta drivers.

One other question, when you changed out video cards... did you do a complete reformat and reinstall of everything? That also could be an issue... couple of legacy nVIDIA components floating around causing problems. Be sure you disable fastwrites and any kind of video/bios shadowing... 7500 doesn't support/like it.

ATI doesn't issue BIOS updates for cards... so that isn't an issue. But updating a few other drivers might help.

 

[Soldat]

i assume since you've tried multiple setups you've checked the basics........return to castle wolfenstein crawled for me with higher anti aliasing settings and i wasn't sure of the problem until i backed off a bit and everything was fine again

 

[tenoc]

FE recommended Athlon or Pll 550, SE ups the ante to 650. SE also
wants a 64mb full opengl or DX8-compliant card minimum.

 

[MyChemEGirl]

Thank you for all the inputs. The minimum requirement suggested a celeron 300a so I thought a little above that would be okay but I guess it wasn't. I just upgraded my cpu and motherboard again, this time to an amd duron 750mhz and it runs much better now with both my geforce2mx and radeon7500. I guess it wasn't the video card at all but either the celerons or my motherboard that wasn't good for gaming.

 

[unclebud]

i don't know much about computers right now i'm trying to replace the v 3 2000 pci with a kyro agp and am getting protection errors but i can tell you that i ran ss2 @ 640x480 16bpp @ 34.2 on a homebuilt k6-2 350 w/ 256mb with the voodoo. also running ss2 on dell cel 900 w/ v 3 3000 pci @ 16bpp and looking nice except for the weird pink textures now and then 32 bit got rid of it, but we all know that slowed it down a bit, so down it goes again.
i second what another poster said, go to that forum and do a search with your computer's specs and you should find what you are looking for.
good luck!