N3O Age Of Empires and Starcraft 2 Clan

Hi everyone. My graphics card crashed in the middle of a game today and I asked myself: Should I adjust my settings? Normally I keep my settings pretty high, but now I'm not sure if that contributed to the problem. What would you suggest about graphics settings? Which is the most important one to adjust for performance? I like the way the game looks, but I am willing to make some adjustments if it makes gameplay substantially better and increases performance. Any tips would be appreciated.

Also, I was messing around with the controls earlier and now when I kill stuff a number does not appear over the victim. How do you turn that feature back on? That always tells me how the battle is going !!

Donno much about that Ben. What I do know is that BA advised me to remove the shadows when I rec the games with fraps. This will make for a less laggy rec. That helps. However!!!!! the game totaly looks shyte this way. My video card is rather powerfull, even if it is a year old, and I always run all my settings on ALL my games on Highest.

My suggestions would be: anything u have at high switch 2 medium. The shadows will make for smother running and Vsync also needs to be tweaked. Game resolution also needs to be tweaked.

out

Btw ive never experienced u lagging with our games, and never have u crashed b4. MayB it was a 1 time deal.

Yeah remove thing the shadows does mike it look bad but helps performance loads. If you think about it for every object there is a shadow has to be rendered as well that mirrors the object so by removing shadows your removing half of the rendering that has to be done for each unit/tree/building or whatever. Just removing this alone should help your graphics card cope better.

A struggling graphics card will cause lag. If it goes "bang" this is less a performance issue and more likely due to lack of cooling or wear and tear. Expensive cards can go bang just as easily as lower spec ones!

Take the side off the case and check the GPU fan is running and look to installing a temp probe.

For me I know my card is not that powerful so I have my graphics as low as possible. So I took of shadows and the mirros also I turned down the graphics that show a building falling apart as you are destroying it so for me now it just vanishes after a little bit. I have no idea how you got rid of the number thing.

Shadows are micro's worst nightmare, I dunno what they were doing there :p

Thanks for the tips, gentlemen. I turned my settings to medium and dispensed with some shadow effects. It seems to have worked quite well, even if the game now looks a little worse. But by this stage, I've seen it all; all I care about is good performance now.

Nice tip about possible overheating, Ruminator. Maybe I will point a fan at the computer! And perhaps that explains why it gets so darn hot in the room when I play prolonged AOE sessions (excitement has nothing to do with it ).

Also, the numbers reappeared over kills after I rebooted. I think the program just got lazy and needed a break before behaving again lol.

[quote=""Kaiser_von_Nuben""]Thanks for the tips, gentlemen. I turned my settings to medium and dispensed with some shadow effects. It seems to have worked quite well, even if the game now looks a little worse. But by this stage, I've seen it all; all I care about is good performance now.

Nice tip about possible overheating, Ruminator. Maybe I will point a fan at the computer! And perhaps that explains why it gets so darn hot in the room when I play prolonged AOE sessions (excitement has nothing to do with it ).

Also, the numbers reappeared over kills after I rebooted. I think the program just got lazy and needed a break before behaving again lol.[/quote]

What graphics card have you got, and have you ever taken the side off your pc to see how much dust and "fluff" you have accumulated?

I find that turning off the "Tracer effects" (Lines from a musket shot), the effect that makes the smoke from guns, and Shadows to be the main graphics problems, so I'd recommend turning those off.

^Strokey, no I haven't checked inside the computer in a long time. I am quite technically ignorant, and I am pretty bad about maintenance. I will have a look in the machine to see if it's clean. Also, I have a nVidia 8600 GE card. I got it about a year and half ago.

A can of air can do wonders for performance. I clean mine every 2 weeks. You could eat of my vid card!!!!!

Take the vaccum cleaner, hold it near the cooler and everything is done for the next 1-2 years.

But i think in the end it is your graphics card which isn't powerful enough to handle everything. So it was right to tuen down settings

I'm running a mac, so I'm not quite sure. But, can't you also turn up the fan speeds to keep things a little cooler, if needed?

Sounds good about vaccuuming out the core. I will do that today.

But the bottom line is that I had too many uhlans on the map at once!! The graphics card just couldn't take all those bad boys running around the Great Plains while processing the shadows cast by buffalos. :-P