What am I not doing correctly? Games not running smoothly.

[Horse]

Hi everybody,

I recently purchased a 17" PB w/ 1 GB of Ram.

I installed Diablo II (which ran great on my Blueberry Ibook) and it runs horribly. It drops numerous frames, will halt all together than mysteriously flow smoothly for a few minutes than starting dropping frames again.

With the advent of Jaguar, I'm sure there's some step I missed out on when it comes to playing games and getting them to run smoothly.

What am I missing?

Thanks,

Horse

[altivec 2003]

Your laptop is way way way overkill for diablo II, but there are several things that might cause bad performance. If you are running it on osX, make sure you download the os X patch becuase if ya don't, you will be running it in classic emulation. Other than that, you should make sure that you set up your graphics card the first time you run it. Those are really the only two reasons i can think of that diablo II would run slowly. Hope this helps :)

[job]

Were you running Diablo 2 in OS 9 on your iBook?

Diablo 2 runs fine in OS 9 but has performance issues in OS X.

[Horse]

I was indeed running it on OS 9 on my Ibook.

I have downloaded all the Jaguar updates. So unless there is a Diablo Patch that I don't know about, I should be up to date on that end of things.

The crazy thing is, when I'm not running the game at full screen, it runs perfectly smoothly. As soon as I command-M and bring it back to full screen it gets all the hick-ups.

When you say configure the graphics card, do you mean through a utility in Mac OSX or through Diablo II?

My basic goal was to get games up and running that I new used to run fine under my Ibook so I could go out and get something a bit more demanding like Warcraft III (and hopefully, one day, if it ever gets ported, Command and Conquer Generals).

Thanks again,
Horse

[iAmAzN]

Have you tried pressing+holding the option button down and then opening diablo?

[job]

Warcraft3 will run much better in X than Diablo2 does.

You might not be able to get Diablo2 to run as fast in OSX as it did in OS9. My advice would be to download every possible update for Diablo.

When it comes down to it, performance in OSX may never be acceptable. :(

[Horse]

Just for the sake of completeness, I downloaded all the Diablo II patches and it is now running very smoothly under OSX. There is a little slowdown (very little) when there are numerous creatures on the board, but othewise it's a 100% turn around from last night.

Thanks for all the help!

Horse

[job]

Originally posted by Horse
Just for the sake of completeness, I downloaded all the Diablo II patches and it is now running very smoothly under OSX. There is a little slowdown (very little) when there are numerous creatures on the board, but othewise it's a 100% turn around from last night.

Thanks for all the help!

Horse

Glad to hear it. :)

[Les Kern]

This may or may not be related, but it might help.
I just got a 1.42GB DP and tried to play Ghost Recon. It was HORRIBLE. Lousy graphics, drops, just plain bad. Hell, it ran incredibly fast on my 867. It finally dawned on me (I'm not much of a gamer and know little of what other folks here know) to match the display settings. Once I said "1024x768" on the game and my 21" Sony monitor, the graphics were incredible. Interstingly enough the FPS STAYS on 30, but sneaks up to over 60 at odd toimes, so I think it's not accurate.

[job]

What's interesting to note is that modern GFX cards perform better at higher resolutions and detail settings. One may think that lowering the resolution may increase performance, but in some instances your performance will actually decrease.

FPS numbers posted in the IMG forum show very little change between a computer running UT2k3 at 640*480 and 1024*768.

So up the resolution and enjoy. :)