But the Diagnostics show no problem!

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protagonistics

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Feb 14, 2006
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I love Doom. I recently discovered an old copy of it lying around and now I'm trying to get everyone on my floor to play it. One problem. My compy will not and has never played first person games at the right speed. I have Nvidia something or other 64mb card. all diagnostics tests show that it has the average frame rate for various games (aoe III, halflife 1 (yes, that's a ONE), Little Fighter 2, LOTR) and that there are no problems with it. I know it is not a stellar card and I don't expect top notch performance- but when I can't play DOOM at the right speed? My best friend has the exact same card, processor (3.2 ghz) and ram (512) and runs all sorts of things I can't and does so without any slowdown at all. I have reinstalled XP three times, defragged, even overclocked my card just a little to see if there is a change- nothing changed for any game. basically, whatever I play runs slower than my best friend's computer. I am at wit's end and none of the technicians on the phone believe me (well, that's what I get for buying Dell.) isn't there anyone out there who can help me out with this. Doom runs as if it took place underwater: at half speed with sudden speedups that are without any pattern- they happen randomly and the music speeds up to the correct tempo. I played this thing on my 386 years and years ago then moved to a pentium 2 machine and it worked wonderfully. What in hell is going on with my gaming?? It has Always been like this!
Oddly enough, I found that Doom, when played with Jdoom starter applet, runs correctly at a smaller resolution in windowed mode- but that STILL doesn't explain why my friend's comp runs it perfectly at full screen!
MS XP sv2
Nvidia Go5200 64mb vid card with Omega driver
512 Ram
30gb hd
spyware and virus free
 
Well first off, Doom Doom2 and other games of that age do not use the video card for 3d at all. It is entirely software rendered. So your problem is not your video card.

So with that out of the way, find out what is the problem with your computer.. is it perhaps going into speedstep power saving mode at the wrong time? Or is there something running in the background eating up CPU cycles and not properly letting other software run? Etc

==>Lazn
 
Note that it's not just with Doom. Rather, I was using Doom as, what I take as, an unbelievable example of something terribly wrong that I can't figure out. What is speedstep powersaving, I've never heard of it. It does this with every first person game and is significantly slower with strategy games like AOE3. just clarifying. I'm at this forum because I can't find help anywhere else.

what could it be that's doing this?
 
I think the last post had a finger on what might be the problem. When a game doesn't use the video card for rendering it uses software rendering. Some of the older games I like to play ie mech commander 2 try to use a 3d hardware device but dont work well. If you try to go into the options of the game itself, it may give you a choice between 3d hardware and software rendering. Choose the software rendering option and that may help. Another thing I just thought of, most of the older games are 16 bit and are not compatible with windows xp. If you right click on the icon for doom, go to properties and click on the compatibility tab. then change the compatibility to win 95 or 98 and see if that doesn't take care of the problem.
 
First off, what computer do you have? From the specs you gave it seems it might be a laptop. If so: go to Control Panel > Power Options and select “always on”

Also get something to monitor the CPU temperature to see if it is having problems. Speedfan is one option for this http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Just for the fun of it, get Sisoft Sandra http://www.sisoftware.net/ and do some benchmarking and problem checking with it. It is not a great benchmark program, but it can be usefull in finding problems.

==>Lazn
 
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