Widescreen Gaming Forum

well, first of all cheers to all of you!

my problem concerns the game undying which i'm trying to run on a xp1900+ with 512 mb ram and a geforce3 ti-200 gpu.
should not be that hard, i guess.
unfortunately the games framerate drops to about...well...maybe one frame every 5 secs, as soon as any lightsources appear (for example the very first scene outside the house).
as soon as i passe the lights or look straight down to the ground, the engine runs smooth.

as most of the undying boards seem to be down, i hope to find help in this forum.

thx in advance...


p.s.: this problem occours wheather i use a standard, or a custom widescreen
resolution of 1440x900.
i'm in no case able to run the game with full details (1024x768 runs with
all settings set to maximum as long as skin details is set to medium).

Tweaks: Ultimate Gamer Mother Lode ! ATI/nVidea/Win XP/Games

See other Game & System tweaks on this site.

thx a lot for trying to help.
if i got everything right, these tweaks exist to improve my system settings.

my idea was that my pc should be able to run undying with full details, so, considering the fact that various other games perform very well and stable, i'm trying to figure out why this game in special would not want to run.

i just downgraded from directx 9.0c to 8.1, the game still performs very poor.




i still appreciate every hint from your side...///

1) As your GPU has only 64 MB DDR (even though game specs say that is sufficient) that might be your issue.

2) Have you tried to "dumb down" the in-game eyecandy & sound options settings ??

3) is a xp1900+ equal to or greater than a Pentium III 400 MHz or faster processor ?

4) You might also have to many apps running in the background (anitvirus, MSN/Yahoo Messenger etc) for your RAM size.

5) Shut as many down as you can safely do - if you don't know what one does leave it alone.

6) Have you defragged your HD ??

7) Post all your system specs here....

3) is a xp1900+ equal to or greater than a Pentium III 400 MHz or faster processor ?

Are you really serious with that question? :shock:. If it wasnt a joke then... If one remembers AMDs naming convention, an XP 1900 was meant to compete with a P4 running at 1.9GHz (1.6GHz is its clock speed).

If it WAS a joke... Bad bad joke! :P.

No joke at all

As in all seriousness - I never even cared enough to really follow AMD :roll:
(or nVidea for that matter after they killed & ate Voodoo :evil: .

I care as much about AMD as I do about Fords...

Under one frame per second is abnormal; standard performance boosting tricks are unlikely to solve your problem. Stuff like defragging and driver tweaks are potentially useful when you're getting 50FPS and want 60, but not so much when you're getting 0.2 FPS. That kind of problem is almost always the case of your GPU being asked to do something it doesn't know how to do, never because your system isn't optimized enough.

First, make sure you are using nVidia drivers. Not drivers from your board manufacturer, but from nvidia.com. I wouldn't worry about them being "too new;" it's very unlikely that you would have a problem like this as a result of having too new drivers, but having too old drivers could EASILY cause this problem. Same deal with DirectX; I would keep the latest version for the purpose of troubleshooting this bug.

If you have all that and the problem persists, try lowering your graphics options down to the bare minimum, and see if the problem goes away. If it does, raise your options to the maximum, one by one, until you find the option that makes the game crawl.

If that doesn't do anything, try forcing the game to run in software mode, Direct3D mode, and OpenGL mode (one at a time). Do not use Glide or S3 Metal; those are guaranteed to cause problems (in fact, that *could* be the source of your problem right now).

well, that's one good post of yours.

i, too, got the idea, my gpu was asked to perform actions it's phisycally not able to perform, but as the gpu is newer than the game i discarded that thought.
at the moment i'm using the forceware 71.84, so that should be new enough.
i didn't yet try to install an old driver, as with those i got the problem of not being able to change the desktop resolution to 1440x900.

using directx 9.0c in the first place, i replaced it with 8.1, still getting the same results.
also i already tried all possible driver modes with the result that gilde didn't perform at all (we know why...), software mode looks odd and direct3d is just the setting i get those probs with (i think there was no option of changing to opengl at all...).

concerning your tip to lower the settings, then raise them to the point where the symptoms occur, i'm still of the opinion that if my system runs games like mohaa with all details enabled, it should run undying like nothing (also i ain't got that problem with american mcgee's alice that, as far as i know, uses the same engine).


thx for your reply.
if you got more ideas, i'd appreciate more posts from all of you, as i already tried everything i could think of to solve the prob.

i, too, got the idea, my gpu was asked to perform actions it's phisycally not able to perform, but as the gpu is newer than the game i discarded that thought.

Note that I said "doesn't know how to do." That's different from being "physically not able to perform." Your GPU is physically capable of anything Undying can throw at it, but other factors may prevent it from "knowing how to do" it. A common cause for this is having outdated drivers, though since you said you have the Forceware's, that definitely isn't the case.

i didn't yet try to install an old driver

I wouldn't bother yet. Remember, you're trying to resolve an anomaly, not squeeze a few more drops of speed out of a stable system.

using directx 9.0c in the first place, i replaced it with 8.1, still getting the same results.

Keep using DX 9.0c.

i think there was no option of changing to opengl at all...

There should be one. Look for an option that says something like "show/hide unsupported renderers;" that should make OpenGL available.

i'm still of the opinion that if my system runs games like mohaa with all details enabled, it should run undying like nothing

There's the way things should be, and there's the way things are. Seriously, if you haven't tried that suggestion, I strongly recommend trying it. Something is choking your system, and finding a "safe" level of operation is the first step in isolating it. Once you isolate it, you are in a better position to fix it.

american mcgee's alice that, as far as i know, uses the same engine

American McGee's Alice uses the Quake III engine, which uses OpenGL exclusively. Undying uses the Unreal Engine, which uses Direct3D but unofficially supports OpenGL too.

is it possible that my forceware 71.84 doesn't support opengl...?
no idea how and why you should know that, but it's the last possibility i can think of...