synobal said:
ElNeroDiablo said:
Did you try running TF2 as a windowed program at a resolution of (say) 1440x800 with a free copy of FRAPS in the background to give you an idea of the FPS your current system can provide at the lower size?
Also, lowering the detail quality in-game (check the Advanced option under Video from the main menu in TF2) to barebones lowest can sometime provide that extra bit power for the game to play (as I found out with XP Pro SP2 32-bit, an old PCI Radeon 9250 and a 3.0GHz P4 in a Dell GX520), true it will be at lower graphical quality compared to (say) the Intel HD Graphics 2000 in a Core i7 2600 (like my current system), but reducing the graphical labour on the system can enhance the performance out of it (even when limited).
If I had to guess the issue I'd say windows 7 is using up most his ram forcing a lot of disk caching with his game. Thus slowing it down massively.
Yeah, that's part of the reason I recommend basically Double to Quadruple what Microsoft say as the "Minumum" amount of RAM for Windows in a system (considering RAM is relatively cheaper the bigger the size on the stick). XP needs 512MB of RAM? Go for 1 to 2GB. 7 says 1GB of RAM? Go for 4 or more.
Hell, I've got a 4GB DRR3 chip in my system, 256MB of which is serving as VideoRAM until I install an actual video card, the other 3.75GB for Windows. Firefox 4.0.1 after a good day's browsing (for me, which can involve over 200 websites at a time) can chew up to 2GB on its own. So thanks to Mozilla having to screw up their otherwise awesome browser to play in Microsoft's playland I'm getting another 4GB RAM chip so I can keep Firefox open and play the hell out of TF2 or Minecraft.
DustArma[]TF2 is very resource intensive, it might not have been at first but with all the subsequent updates the requirements have just gone upwards, the lack of LOD settings on several of the unlocks doesn't help either.
Though that might have fixed it already.
I was playing post-Halloween Update through to before the Steam-PSN login merger update of Steam on my GX520 I mentioned there (2x2GB DDR2 667MHz for 4GB total, but 32-bit XP meant it only saw 3.25GB), until I started having problems with Steam not working (turned out the update screwed over a particular program I was using to force all my Steam traffic into my ISP's Freezone usage). Hell, I was still using that system as a backup desktop until I got the final parts to build my i7 2600 system, and even here TF2 doesn't chew up 1GB of RAM unlike Java for Minecraft.
