Abysmal performance with anti-aliasing enabled

E

Electronoire

First time out of the vault
For a while I've been trying to figure out an odd problem with the game. When anti-aliased tiles and characters are enabled the game starts to slow down considerably and sometimes even becomes unplayable when the screen is filled with action.

I've been testing the game with different kinds of hardware and here comes the interesting part. All the newer computers (with Intel/AMD quad core CPUs, Nvidia GTX 400/500/600 GPUs) have the same problem but my ancient Acer laptop with single core CPU and integrated SiS graphics has absolutely no problems running the game in highest resolution and and with both anti-aliasing options enabled!

I completed the whole game with this old laptop recently and only place where I had a some lag and choppy moments was in Newton. All else was silky smooth and I'm not kidding.

This is really baffling and I feel like I've tried every possible thing regarding drivers, OS settings, configurations etc but none of them have any effect whatsoever. I can't think of any other explanation than some kind of severe compatibility issue/bug perhaps. I've searched everywhere but a real fix is nowhere to be found. There are numerous performance issue topics in this forum (and elsewhere) too so it's a widespread problem.

Any ideas what might cause this? Anyone here with a newer system that runs the game properly?
 
As I'm not a modder, and my days of studying programming language are long behind me, my thoughts on this are at best an educated guess, so take my answer with a grain of salt.

The issue strikes me as perhaps the same as what FO2 experienced with modern desktops, chiefly the problems with traveling the map, and dying early on because of an excessive number of unavoidable random encounters at low levels. The game engine wasn't design to take processor seed into account when calculating certain probabilities, so when calculations were made in real-time (like when traversing the map), the faster the processor, the more work the game engine would do. So the game's performance would work inversely to the quality of the CPU you had (up to the "recommended" CPU).

It sounds an awful lot like what bogs down FOT is another, not too dissimilar issue where the code goes into overdrive because of modern PC builds that it wasn't prepared for. The problem with this is that unlike FO2, FOT never achieved the same cult following, and even on these boards, it's largely dismissed, so the level of mods and unofficial fixes for it are few and far between. Considering how the public released version of FO2 is FAR buggier than the FOT release, it's quite telling that you can still get a really enjoyable experience with FO2, as far as performance is concerned, simply because of how dedicated many users have been to solving the issues that game has had and accumulated over the years. I personally love FOT, and I'm right there with you in replaying it again recently (I just completed St. Louis on my snail-paced Tough Guy + Insane Difficulty run), but alas, it just doesn't have the same overall love from the community, and it's lacking in dedicated modders who keep up with its issues and code their own solutions to share with everyone else... =(
 
FO:T has stunning isometric sprites in it. Wish I could use them commercially without getting sued.

Yeah, you're gonna have to run it inside a virtual machine of some sort.
 
SnapSlav said:
As I'm not a modder, and my days of studying programming language are long behind me, my thoughts on this are at best an educated guess, so take my answer with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...

Who knows, you might be on a right track there SnapSlav. I'm going to have to experiment a little with low power states. It's worth trying if downclocking both GPU and CPU as much possible has any effect (and setting CPU affinity on top of that too).
 
Well, I've been testing again with the game and underclocking in my case has zero effect on how the game runs. It's back to square one.

I got the opportunity to try the game with even more different hardware as I've been servicing laptops from friends and relatives.

This time I installed the game on a budget Toshiba laptop with Intel i5 dual core/HD Graphics 3000 running on Windows 7 32-bit and to my surprise the game runs absolutely fantastic straight out of the box. No lag and no choppiness at all!

I'm beginning to think it has to be the video cards from AMD/NVIDIA causing the issues. Possibly just driver related but who knows.
 
I have a Windows 8 PC with a AMD Elite Quad-Core A8-6500 Accelerated Processor 8GB of RAM and FT runs perfect with absolutely no lag but my old Windows 7 PC would lag a LOT! Whenever a lot of action was going on the screen, I don't know exactly what the specs are on that PC :(

And for SnapSlav I am one of the very few modders working on fixing the bugs in this game.
 
Damn. All the posts about bugs got zapped. RobertHouse do you remember what was the last thing you were writing about?

I mentioned about a bug I encountered in Peoria. Did you catch that?
 
The unable to move bug: That's a game engine bug, it should be fixed if you use the update bonding box information tool that's in the level editor.

One second I will update this post with a tutorial on how to fix it.

Please repeat the Peoria bug, I am unsure as to what that is lol.

Thanks.
 
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Being unable to move happened in Peoria, that's the one :). If I selected this stuck character it would only show black graphics all around him and none of the real level anymore.
 
Ahhh, OK :)
Ya your character fell through the tiles, when your under a roof the roof will go invisible, that explains the mission disappearing, and it doesn't just happen in Peoria it happens in all maps.
 
Right. That explains it.

Is it completely random or are there certain places where it can happen? I've only encountered it couple of times and both was in that one room in Peoria.
 
In certain places, but there is always a possibility that it could happen on any map, it's happened to me in a map I can't think of at the moment, I will edit this post when I look at the maps.
 
RobertHouse said:
I have a Windows 8 PC with a AMD Elite Quad-Core A8-6500 Accelerated Processor 8GB of RAM and FT runs perfect with absolutely no lag but my old Windows 7 PC would lag a LOT! Whenever a lot of action was going on the screen, I don't know exactly what the specs are on that PC :(
Click to expand...

I'm having this exact problem right now. Did you find out any way to fix it? I think I saw something about installing the game while running some program "faking" an earlyer OS or something to that effect, seemed like a huge hastle for something that should be a no brainer - old-ass game not lagging on brand new computer o_-
such a shame, I got to the 2nd mission, and as soon as I woke the raider camp up, everything just ground down to a halt, totally unplayable. Tried some tricks, like anti-alias on or off, but that was pointless of course..
 
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