Oolite Bulletins

Hey chaps

My dad has just done another reinstall of XP, and he wants me to put Oolite on for him. It's not gone well.

Oolite is installed, and runs, but it's so slow and jerky, it's unplayable. Surely it shouldn't be this way.

It's a 3GHz P4, 512 mb, Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card, all running XP SP2.

Can anyone offer any pointers if it's something obvious and fixable, or what I need to look for? Bear in mind, I'm a Mac user, so I'm not so adept with Windows, so idiot's guide format if you please.

Thanks.

Lack of RAM is the main problem with PC Oolite. (The Dark One Gates's OS chews up more memory than the Mac's OS, so you need more RAM to run Oolite - and things generally - than on the Mac). On the plus side, PC memory is cheap and most PC motherboards come with loads of free space for extra RAM cards!

Oolite will run with less RAM than ideal, but however fast the processor, it doesn't run well if it has to swap to disk, juddering and often crashing.

I run OK with all 100 odd OXPs installed with a 4 year old system (well slow), but have 750M of RAM. A 512M card is about £30 and makes a hugh difference to system performance (not just Oolite!).

500M is really not enough to run Oolite well (with the amount of RAM Windows and virus software chews up). Could turn off the virus / spyware software to free up some RAM, but I get the odd judder on the PC with 750 M and I reckon 1G is probaley the optium memory to run well.

it's probably just a driver you need to install.

Often jerky gameplay means you don't have the latest drivers installed for your graphics card, which might very well be the case with a fresh install... Go to Nvidia's site to check for the latest drivers, I'd say.

Rxke wrote:

it's probably just a driver you need to install.

Often jerky gameplay means you don't have the latest drivers installed for your graphics card, which might very well be the case with a fresh install... Go to Nvidia's site to check for the latest drivers, I'd say.

Well, I did click something on the graphics settings thing which - I assume - went online to check if there was anything newer, but it came back blank. So I assumed it was up to date. I'll install the one direct from the site when next I'm round there. Thanks.

Even so, I wouldn't expect it to be this bad, even with a slightly outdated driver. Surely? When approaching a station to dock, it slows to 4 FPS. Just flying around in empty space it barely gets above 15 FPS. And that's with reduced detail on. That's shockingly bad, isn't it?

Reminds me why I use a Mac!

Dark1 wrote:

Even so, I wouldn't expect it to be this bad, even with a slightly outdated driver. Surely? When approaching a station to dock, it slows to 4 FPS. Just flying around in empty space it barely gets above 15 FPS. And that's with reduced detail on. That's shockingly bad, isn't it?

Sounds like a case of no graphics card driver at all, which means that the processor itself is doing all the work in the graphics department as well and with only 512MB mem to work with, it will be struggling.

So, check out and install the Nvidia graphics card driver and you should be ok.

Yeah, I have a 350MHz PowerPC Mac, with 384Mb, and get better framerates than that.

Definitely not normal.

I'm almost sure it will be video drivers. It sounds like the OpenGL calls are being done in software rather than on the video card.

Try some other OpenGL games or demos and see if they run full speed or not.

Then go to the nvidia site and download and install the latest drivers.

Are you sure it's detecting your graphics card? I had to make changes in the BIOS before I could get mine to work (but watch out - read my thread to see what happened: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=2568 )

nb I only have 512Mb of RAM and it hardly judders with the card installed. Then again I don't have all the OXPs.

Dark1 wrote:

It's a 3GHz P4, 512 mb, Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card, all running XP SP2.

I have this card, on XP Pro, 768MB, 1.5ghz Athalon. Oolite runs just fine.

XP does NOT install a native driver to support this card. I'll second what others have said, go to nVidea's website and download the reference driver for XP.
Even better, install the driver from the CD that came with the card, if possible. Not all cards using this chipset are the same; some manufactuers tweak it a bit, and often provide tweaked drivers to fit. Creative is especially bad about it, so bad that often nVidea's reference drivers won't work at all.

Good luck.

Thanks for all the tips chaps. Will install the Nvidia driver off their site when next I'm round at my Dad's house. Fingers crossed.

Cheers.

@Dark1 - hope you got this sorted - my work colleague who got the Oolite bug after I posted the link on my company Newsgroup only got 4fps with an FX5500 installed - turns out he'd only used the native XP driver - which does power the card but doesn't come with any OpenGL support (MS being the bar stewards who have created the uninstallable DX9c) - he went to the nvidia site - latest version of forceware and he went from 4fps to 40fps on an 2.8GHz P4.

Hey chaps.

The good news is that the drivers from Nvidia solved it. Smooth as a baby's bottom!

However, the bad news is, he's got Vista now and Oolite has gone all tits up again. And this time, having gone to the Nvidia website, the FX5200 isn't in the supported card list for the Vista driver.

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/winvista ... 65_uk.html

Is this because it isn't needed and this is as quick as Vista is capable to going on hardware of this vintage, or are Nvidia just not bothering to support their older graphics cards?

Many perihelia still lack decent Vista drivers and that's one of the reasons people aren't upgrading to Vista that eagerly. You may have to wait a while until Nvidia has got their latest and greatest products supported, before they turn their attention to the older cards.