Recommended system specs for running Dark Places?

[FRAGBOY]

Hello folks

I have just installed Dark Places as well as other tweaks (Thank you Splitterface) but noticed that this is very very resource hungry so I had to turn a lot of the settings off/down to have it running smoothly and set the resolution to 640x480x32

I am running an older system so know that an upgrade would benefit me greatly. I will list my specs and if someone could advise what seems a fair spec to run at decent resolutions with all the bells and whistles on?

Specs are:

Asus A8N SLI Premium mob
AMD Athlon X64 4400 (2.2 ghz dual core)
4 GB Geil PC 3200 (4x1gb) 400 mhz Ram
2 x XFX 7800 GTX Extreme 256 mb cards in SLI
Creative Audigy 2
2 x WD 7200 prm sata 2 drives in raid 0
Antec Truepower blue 750w modular PSU
LG 22" widescreen LCD (1920x1080 native)

Also have:
MSI AM2 mob
AMD Athlon X64 5200 dual core
4 GB OCZ PC2 6400 (2x2gb) 800 mhz Ram
1 x XFX 7800 GTX 512 mb card
Creative Audigy 2
2 x WD Raptor 10,000 rpm sata 2 drives in raid 0
650w psu

Dark places runs a bit lumpy on the SLI rig, not tried on the single card one.

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[talisa]

first, check my pm fragboy

and you dont necesarily need an uber-fast pc for darkplaces, but the setup i gave you has all possible bells and whistles there are available added, and every fancy option and effect turned on, and every of those adds extra work your compy has to do.

so as i said, turn offsetmapping off by 'typing r_glsl_offsetmapping 0' in console,
turn rt lighting off by going to options, highlight lighting:normal and press enter,
and turn the fancy water effect off which also uses a lot of resources by opening console and typing 'r_water 0'

and what will also help is this... go to the ID1 folder, open the autoexec.cfg with notepad, scroll down, and there are these two lines:
r_drawdecals_drawdistance is "20000"
r_drawparticles_drawdistance "20000"

change them to this:
r_drawdecals_drawdistance is "500"
r_drawparticles_drawdistance "2000"

that should also help


if that sill doesnt help enough, try removing the fancy rain and fog effects by removing the 'Seven-rain-fog-ID1.pk3' from your ID1 folder. those also can use quite some resources, and removing them might help a lot too in getting better fps

[Mindf!3ldzX]

[TIPS] How to Enable SLI and CrossFire Support for OpenGL Applications - 3D Tech News and Pixel Hacking - Geeks3D.com


Have you checked to make sure both GPU's are being putting under load while running darkplaces? Darkplaces wasn't 'ready out of the box' for my dual Radeon's, I had to rename darkplaces.exe to AFR-FriendlyOGL.exe. I linked to you a site explaining how to get both your 7800GTX's running, just in case.

[FRAGBOY]

Thanks both of you for the advice, I shall look over what you ave both shown and will see where the balance of performance and quality meets on my SLI system.

The reason I haven't upgraded in a while is simple, it runs what I play on it perfectly and I have all the next gen HD consoles so game on these on my 46 LCD panel. Vanillia Q1 (Patched to run GL) alway ran like a little sweetie so I started urning everything off on the Darkplaces install

Will look deeper into it now

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