fps drops (does not happen on Win XP)

[Der_Landser]

Hello.

I have been playing PR for years on laptop that probably does not meet recommended specifications, but I managed to make even PR 1.0 work rather well. All of this using Windows XP.

My laptop specs:
Intel Core Duo processor T5600(1.83GHz)
2GB + 512MB dual channel DDR2 RAM Memory
160GB HDD running in AHCI
ATI Mobility RADEON X1400 128MB (512MB HyperMemory)

Lately, I have switched to Windows 7 thinking that my experience will improve, but it was quite the opposite. With both Win 7 64 or 32bit, my experience with BF2 has deteriorated.

As demonstrated on the video below, I am experiencing big fps drop, even while running vanilla BF2, local multiplayer (or singleplayer) game without (or with) bots:



On begining of the video, you may notice some texture flickering for a fraction of second:



None of this happens on same settings (all details high, rendering distance 100%, 1024x768 resolution) while running on Windows XP.

I am getting quite desperate by now as you will see that I have tried a lot of things to no avail:

1. Different video drivers, ranging from windows update one to vendor drivers for my laptop to legacy ATI (9.3.1 to 10.2) using mobility modder
2. 32 and 64 bit Win 7
3. Disabled aero theme and all Win 7 visual effects in performance tab
4. Messed about with compatibility settings in shortcut properties and also with checking/unchecking other options there (desktop composition, run as administrator, etc.)
5. Ran the game before and after updating windows
6. Deleted the shader cache folder several times
7. Updated laptop bios
8. Changed Windows 7 power scheme to high performance
9. Many more things I came across on forums
10. Installed monitor driver
11. Checked for CPU / GPU temperatures, cleaned the fan and replaced the thermal paste for just in case, does not overheat.

Thank you for reading this, I hope to see some more suggestions on how to fix this

[LITOralis.nMd]

That is really pushing the limits of what can run PR.

Since you seem to understand how to use Mobility Modder, I am going to assume you are pretty educated on PC usage.

My opinion would be:
If you have access to another PC that has a DVD recordable drive,
build a custom stripped down installation of Windows 7.
RT Seven Lite - Features and Information
or
BuClean Suite (Studio) Official Blog

I suggest this to remove any and every unnecessary Windows process/service from eating your CPU cycles and RAM.

Learning how to do this can take a while,
-----------------

Immediate things to try:
1. Use ProcessLasso Free Process Lasso - Automate and optimize process priorities, CPU affinities, power profiles, and more! to give the PRBF2.exe file a high priority and put it into gaming mode.

-- Start PR, JOIN AN ONLINE SERVER, alt tab to desktop, open ProcessLAsso window, right click on PRBF2.exe, PRLauncher.exe, and PRMumble.exe and pnkbstra.exe and pnkbstrB.exe and give them default priority status of High, set the PRBF2.exe to gaming mode, and give them high or higher access to RAM.
Unpark your CPU Cores in ProcessLasso->Options->Configure CPU Core Parking->UNpark your cores.
Here is information on Core UnParking in Process Lasso: ParkControl - Tweak and monitor core parking in real time!

2. You said you already did this, I'll post my system for doing it:

Try removing all the windows UI graphics options, basically make your winXP look like WinNT, you can use this:

For Windows XP:Tweak UI - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download.com

For Vista, 7, 8: Ultimate Windows Tweaker, a TweakUI for Windows 7 & Vista

and turn off all the windows UI stuff, like windows shadows, mouse shadows, maximize windows animation, etc.

3. try Razer GameBooster Razer Game Booster Free Download, Speed Up PC for Top Gaming Performance to shutdown unneeded background processes.

4. Defrag the drive that has BF2 and PR installed.
PR has some very large compressed files, if they get fragmented it can cause this problem.

[Der_Landser]

First of all, thank you for your extensive reply.

I will keep in mind that custom installation you recommended, but at this point, I just would not like to use "hacked up" Win 7 in case I need some of it's features.

I tried everything else that you suggested and it yielded no result.

In the end, I am switching back to Windows XP.

On the other hand, does anybody have an idea how to fix the problem where being shot at (suppression effect) brings my fps down to about 2?

[Boris]

The big problem with Win7 is that it uses a ton more memory compared to XP (like 1,500MB versus 350MB for XP), and you don't have much installed there. You probably want about 3.5GB to run PR on Win7 comfortably. Any less than that and it's going to be falling back to using hdd-based virtual memory = slow as hell.

Good idea to switch back to XP(64), imo.

Re: Suppression effect; insufficient CPU power, at a guess.

[LITOralis.nMd]

It would also be possible to build a stripped down installation of WinXP, put it on a partition in the front of the drive, make partition just large enough to run XP, antivirus, firewall, and BF2/PR/PRMumble.

You can strip XP down to use as little as 119MB of RAM, add another 70MB for antivirus/firewall, and you'd have plenty of RAM for BF2/PR.

nLite is the favorite, though I often used RyanVM due to ease of adding driverpacks to the install CD.

Best of luck with finding a solution for PR,