Low FPS

[LordReserei]

It's been around 3 years since I've played ST:BC. I decided to dust off my copy and install it today along with KM 1.1 but am experiencing low fps (24-32) even at the main menu, something that I wouldn't expect considering my system specs (in my signature). Whether I disable AA and AF along with other options in AMD Vision Control Center or not doesn't help in any way. Lowering the resolution from 1440x900 does nothing either.

Are there any solutions that someone could offer?

Thank you in advance.

[Mario]

BC uses only 1 core so having a good computer doesn't help much so to speak. Try switching to low color depth and turn off glows.

[LordReserei]

Thanks for the suggestion. But that actually made things worse - dropped down to 10fps at the main menu and without any friendlies or enemy ships in the Belarus system. lol

For extra info, the x6 1090T is OC'd to 3.6GHz. The last time I ran BC before today, I had a HD5670, 8GB DDR3 and a Core2Duo e7500 OC'd to 3.6GHz - BC ran smooth as butter (90fps+ if I recall correctly) with the same settings I'm using now. I was running KM 1.1 2009.12 (Beta), a lot more mods and with 12+ ships at any given time, at that time.

I may try just a vanilla install at some point, but for the mean time t's baffling my mind.

[CyAn1d3]

as mario said, cut the enhanced glows, the specs, even turning off some mods can bring your FPS count up.
the console tracker, for instance, causes a lag everytime it generates/adds to the log, but this depends on how often you tell it to do it also.

keep the battles small, and just keep throwing small waves in. eventually ( at least in my case) BC will go unstable after ive plowed through 7 or 8 waves of attack and reinforcement ships and just randomly crash.

ill deal with it untill excalibur comes out 

[captain_obvious]

Phenom single core performance was never that great, but it should be giving you high fps regardless. 
Odd.

[tiqhud]

Also mite turn off 'space dust' and motion blur

[LordReserei]

Still no luck. With the lowest possible settings, mods disabled and even with a vanilla installation - I'm still getting the same results. I've tried setting the affinity to one core just to see if that has any impact - I've heard of that being a fix for some games.

It's definitely a head scratcher.

[tiqhud]

Is your BC installed, in a complete separate folder, other than Program Files?

[see by your sig , you got Win8]

[LordReserei]

Yeah. I keep all of my games (Steam, Origin, Retail)  installed on my 2TB drive. So BC would be D:\Bridge Commander.

[Mario]

Windows 8 has got nothing to do with it. Might I suggest trying out other games and see if you get similar results there, also try reinstalling graphics drivers and resetting preferences to defaults to see if that helps.

[LordReserei]

Other games going back as far as Armada II, KoTOR, SWAT 4, ST: Legacy, Warhammer 40k DoW: Dark Crusade and JK: Jedi Academy work perfectly fine - 250-300fps. More modern DX11 based games like Crysis 2, BF3, STO, Batman: Arkham City are smooth as butter also.

I've tried reinstalling graphics card drivers a few times, reverting back from the 12.11 Beta to 12.10 and resetting preferences in defaults. I've even put the CPU back to stock clocks/frequencies.

[moed]

Try this if you can:

- Get a second cheap hard drive, say a 250gb or something.
- Put it in your case.
- Install WinXP or Win7 on it (if you have them of course).
- Then set up a dual boot configuration.

I don't agree with Mario on Win8 not having anything to do with the performance issues you're having.  A friend of mine had the exact same issue as you with his Win8 and I went ahead and set up a dual boot config on his machine just as I explained above.  It took care of his problem.  We set up Win7 on his second drive and his BC is running perfectly.

I suspect that there is some kind of compatibility issue with Win8 and BC... and I didn't have the time to go through it with a fine-tooth comb to try to isolate it and figure it out.  Maybe some people are running BC on their Win8 boxes just fine, but hey, sometimes different configs on different systems are as individual as a persons fingerprint.  BC is a fickle beast.

I realize that doing the procedure of setting up a dual boot is definitely an "involved" process but... it worked.

[LordReserei]

Aye. I was thinking of dual-booting, I've done it before (XP/7, 7/Ubuntu, 7/Ubuntu/8 Previews). I never had trouble with BC on 7 - I have a spare 64GB SSD and 250GB partition on another 1TB to choose from.

[StarTrekMike]

I am using Win7 and I have the exact same problem, if I restart my system and then play it, it then seems to run fine but if I do anything else afterwords and then run it again, it will be a slideshow.

  Running it on a modern system and nothing silly running in the background so I can't really explain it.

[Mario]

I don't agree with Mario on Win8 not having anything to do with the performance issues you're having.  A friend of mine had the exact same issue as you with his Win8 and I went ahead and set up a dual boot config on his machine just as I explained above.  It took care of his problem.  We set up Win7 on his second drive and his BC is running perfectly.

Unfortunately the fact is that Windows 8 has generally nothing to do with this issue directly. If the problem was indeed related to a specific OS then these support forums would be crawling with issues. There are tons of people running Windows 8 and BC without any problems, including myself.

LordReserei do you have Hyper-V installed and what c++ redistributable packages do you have installed?

[LordReserei]

Hey everyone,

I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and hope the new year has been a good one thus far. I apologise for not replying or getting in touch sooner. I tried enabling and disabling Hyper-V which didn't affect anything and at the time I had every C++  redistributable package known to mankind as well as .NET packages and DirectX installed.

But in the end, I decided to go back to Windows 7. For a few reasons:

- Other games like Max Payne 3 wouldn't even let me sign into the Rockstar Social Club (I wasn't the only one with this issue)
- Games for Windows Live wouldn't appear after an update with regards to Batman: Arkham City (again, not the only one with the issue)
- Off course, BC having low fps issues
- After thinking about it, other than a little bit of a performance boost and a few things like the Ribbon UI, Task Manager - there is no real reason for me to have Windows 8. I bought StartIsBack to replace the Modern UI/Start Screen which was/is M$'s main pitch for the OS.

After going back to Windows 7, any and all of the above issues were resolved. I've been enjoying Max Payne 3, Games for Windows Live works and I'm getting decent fps in BC again (75fps, unless there's a way to turn off v-sync that I'm not aware of).