F.E.A.R / Combat / Extraction point / Perseus Mandate

[Mchart]

I'm not able to use the max texture setting in this game, and a few others, which I find odd since I have a xfx 7900GT w/ 256mb VRAM. In FEAR and BF2 I basically get really bad stuttering (Textures are being loaded off of the Hard drive). Yes, I have defragged. Yes, I am using a stripped down version of windows. Yes, I dont have crap running in the background.

System -
P5NSLI
Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.8ghz
XFX 7900GT W/ @ 256mb VRAM
2(DDR2 667 512mb 3-3-3-12 timing)
Audigy 2
2(WD 120GB 7200RPM)

I just dont get why this system cant run FEAR or BF2 with maximum texture settings. If I set it to medium, it runs butter smooth. Do these games use more then 256mb VRAM on max texture settings? It just doesnt seem right. Company of Heroes runs fine with the maximum texture setting, Doom3 engine based games run fine with the 'High' Texture setting that uses 256mb of VRAM. So why should these two games be any different?

[The Lizard King]

Well, I have a system about half that power, although the same VRAM, and FEAR and BF2 run smoothly at 1280x1024 at max everything(cept soft shadows in FEAR.) Are those two HDs in RAID 0? Have you tried reinstalling? A long shot, but maybe they installed badly. Although by the sounds of it you have, have you gone through the TGTC, stuttering(mostly) stopped for me after I did, and I was first able to turn up texture size to maximum.

[Mchart]

Originally Posted by The Lizard King

Well, I have a system about half that power, although the same VRAM, and FEAR and BF2 run smoothly at 1280x1024 at max everything(cept soft shadows in FEAR.) Are those two HDs in RAID 0? Have you tried reinstalling? A long shot, but maybe they installed badly. Although by the sounds of it you have, have you gone through the TGTC, stuttering(mostly) stopped for me after I did, and I was first able to turn up texture size to maximum.

They arent in Raid 0, but that shouldnt matter. Assuming the textures are completely loaded in my 1gb of ram, and my 256mb of ram, this issue should not be occuring.

I'm going to try rolling back to an older driver version for the GPU, and see if that helps. I doubt it though.

And yes, I took a gander at the tweakguides.com guide, but it wasn't anything new. I know this system like the back of my hand. The only thing I can really think of that is causing these issues is the Audigy 2. In the past on older system it was the cause of problems in games, and i'm not doubting it is the cause again.

Additional Comment:
Ok, well different drivers didnt help. I did find out something different though.

I turned off my speakers, and it seems that it isnt a hard drive access time issue. The hitches are occuring, and I dont hear any sounds coming from my hard drives. So there is an issue with my VRAM or my normal RAM. What the issue is I dont know. Help is appreciated. I have the ram set with their factory reccomended timings in my bios, so I dont really know what else to do.

[Koroush Ghazi]

This isn't the BF2 thread, but it's well known that BF2 requires 2GB of RAM to run smoothly. FEAR also requires more than 1GB of RAM to run relatively smoothly. If you don't believe me, here, here and here are some quick indicators of this.

Note don't assume that just because you have 1GB of RAM, mean all the textures can or will load into it. No game uses all your RAM to load textures, nor can they be forced to load into there. As you know, RAM isn't only for loading textures into, a lot of other data needs to be temporarily stored there.

Doom3 is completely different to FEAR and BF2, for better or worse (aside from being a year older than them as well), so you can't compare their performance to that in Doom 3.

If you've already tried optimizing your entire system using the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion and the BF2 and FEAR Tweak Guides, then as suggested a faster drive setup will help, but the biggest benefit will be in a RAM upgrade.

[Mchart]

Originally Posted by Koroush Ghazi

This isn't the BF2 thread, but it's well known that BF2 requires 2GB of RAM to run smoothly. FEAR also requires more than 1GB of RAM to run relatively smoothly. If you don't believe me, here, here and here are some quick indicators of this.

Note don't assume that just because you have 1GB of RAM, mean all the textures can or will load into it. No game uses all your RAM to load textures, nor can they be forced to load into there. As you know, RAM isn't only for loading textures into, a lot of other data needs to be temporarily stored there.

Doom3 is completely different to FEAR and BF2, for better or worse (aside from being a year older than them as well), so you can't compare their performance to that in Doom 3.

If you've already tried optimizing your entire system using the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion and the BF2 and FEAR Tweak Guides, then as suggested a faster drive setup will help, but the biggest benefit will be in a RAM upgrade.

Well with BF2, my HD is actually being used when the textures are being swapped in/out, but with FEAR my hard drive is not even being used. The video in the game will just stay frozen, and the audio will keep playing.

[Koroush Ghazi]

The video hitching you're describing shouldn't be all that common in FEAR, especially if you've set the Force Restart option to on.

I have a similar system to you (except using a 256MB 7800GTX which is roughly equal to the 7900GT), and a X2 4400+ which is obviously slower than your CPU but still dual core, as well as an Audigy 2ZS. Both BF2 and FEAR run smoothly for me without anything more than tiny loading pauses/stutter after initial level loads.

I run FEAR at 1280x1024 all settings max (soft shadows off), 2xAA 4xAF and it's very smooth. The only significant difference thus is my 2x 10,000RPM Raptor hard drives in RAID0 formation, and my 2GB of RAM.

That's not to say you can't improve things with general system optimization, or even making sure all your FEAR settings are correct, but since you're convinced that you've already done all that's wise in that area, that doesn't leave much room for improvement in the software department.

[Mchart]

Originally Posted by Koroush Ghazi

The video hitching you're describing shouldn't be all that common in FEAR, especially if you've set the Force Restart option to on.

I have a similar system to you (except using a 256MB 7800GTX which is roughly equal to the 7900GT), and a X2 4400+ which is obviously slower than your CPU but still dual core, as well as an Audigy 2ZS. Both BF2 and FEAR run smoothly for me without anything more than tiny loading pauses/stutter after initial level loads.

I run FEAR at 1280x1024 all settings max (soft shadows off), 2xAA 4xAF and it's very smooth. The only significant difference thus is my 2x 10,000RPM Raptor hard drives in RAID0 formation, and my 2GB of RAM.

That's not to say you can't improve things with general system optimization, or even making sure all your FEAR settings are correct, but since you're convinced that you've already done all that's wise in that area, that doesn't leave much room for improvement in the software department.

What usually causes this sort of issue? I've tried fooling around with different options in the nvidia control panel without any luck. And on the software end of things my system is just fine. (Only essential services running, and nothing running in the background).

[Xenofin]

I have a funny problem, or not so funny anymore after trying several times to update my 1.00 version directly to 1.07. I used UK patch and it installed it without problems. Then I tried to start the single player game and the following message appears: "Original disc could not be found or authenticated". Uninstalled everything and reinstalled 1.00, game starts, no problem. I installed 1.07UK-patch and the above happens again. I checked CD-key.ini and my key is OK. What could be the problem? On my game case i noticed there says: "Fear Export PC DVD, not to be distributed in UK. I bought this DVD in Finland. And what else? If I use the ingame update functionality it tries to update game to 1.07US version and then informs this version of the update is incompatible with the version installed. What can I do?

Edit: Just found out that this is an issue with SecuRom module and basically needs a new fear.exe -file. I patched to 1.03 and replaced fear.exe with the file received from SecuRom (link:http://www.securom.com/support/custo..._t224/FEAR.zip) for patch 1.05 and earlier. And it worked! However, I'm not sure this will work on newer patches, but I'll verify it myself ASAP.

Edit 2: And what happened! I updated game with full update from 1.00 to 1.07UK (even though I had 1.03UK installed) and now everything just works fine. I'm not using above mentioned replacement file anymore. At first I downloaded from Sierra 1.05enb file for UK version but that gave me message my game is not compatible with this patch. I believe now that Sierra has somehow mixed patches.

[Mchart]

Originally Posted by Xenofin

I have a funny problem, or not so funny anymore after trying several times to update my 1.00 version directly to 1.07. I used UK patch and it installed it without problems. Then I tried to start the single player game and the following message appears: "Original disc could not be found or authenticated". Uninstalled everything and reinstalled 1.00, game starts, no problem. I installed 1.07UK-patch and the above happens again. I checked CD-key.ini and my key is OK. What could be the problem? On my game case i noticed there says: "Fear Export PC DVD, not to be distributed in UK. I bought this DVD in Finland. And what else? If I use the ingame update functionality it tries to update game to 1.07US version and then informs this version of the update is incompatible with the version installed. What can I do?

Moderator Edit:

Removed comment regarding bypassing copy protection. Such topics are not allowed to be discussed here and is clearly stated in the Forum Rules - SortYa

[Samjung]

Hmm I sometimes get stuttering at heavy fire fights (Multiplay), with multiple enemy's at my screen. Is this because of my 1 GB RAM? I may buy 2x 1 GB Instead of 4x256 which I have now..