Games In General

[Guest]

Last week i bought a new pc from pcworld with home basic on , i was exited to
start playing my games on my much better pc

Then when i installed the games they ran so slow that it is impossible to
play them which is quite bad considering my very old 800mhz athlon k-2 slot
computer could play games better than my new Intel celeron d 3.33ghz computer.

Plus even worse i cant load any Half-Life 2 games off steam this is
basically any game on steam using the hl2.exe, when i try to load hl2.exe i
just get "hl2.exe has stopped working"

But the slow games is most important

Can anyone help me please?

Thanks

 

[Dale M. White]

Well, without more specs, I'm not sure how much help we can offer. The short
answer is, I can play all the games on Steam under both Vista32 and Vista64,
so the problem you are seeing is something on your side. Of course,a look
over in the valve forums and Steam is not a problem just under Vista, but
plenty of XP users are still having issues.
A couple of questions would be, Have you downloaded the latest video card
drivers, have you downloaded any updated motherboard drivers, Sound card
drivers etc etc.

Also, can you quantify "slow games" Were you running doom3 at 100fps adn now
you getting 50fps ? Fear at 50fps and now 30 fps ? Again, a list of your
hardware components will help us understand what to look for.

On a side note, Vista is expected to be 5-10% slower than XP in the vide
games department. I would say that' teh case overall. In games like doom3,
I'm seeing more in the neighborhood of a 20% slowdown (I get 131fps in XP
and 110 under Vista32), but that is likely due to pool OpenGL support in the
current drivers

 

[Guest]

hmm pc specs , uill turn to dxdiag and my xfire gaming rig for this

Manufacturer: Pc World
Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) D CPU 3.33GHz, ~3.3GHz
Memory: 446MB RAM
Hard Drive: 154 GB
Video Card: VIA Chrome9 HC IGP WDDM
Monitor: 15 Inch Lcd Monitor
Sound Card: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Speakers/Headphones: On Board
Keyboard: Microsoft PS/2 Keyboard
Mouse: HID-compliant mouse
Mouse Surface: Funky mouse mat with gel pad and a built in calculator
Operating System: Windows Vistaâ„¢ Home Basic (6.0, Build 6000)
(6000.vista_rtm.061101-2205)


and the game that seems to lag the most is Sin Episodes Emergence , i get
0-2 fps o_0

 

[Dale White]

I don't want to insult your new system, but your ram is way below anything I
would suggest for Vista and Vista gaming. I run 2GB of ram, and under HL2, I
can get up to 1.5GB in use under vista. 446 Meg is an odd number to begig
with, though I'm guessing the video card is using 64 meg,w hich means you
have 512.

And you video card is horrible. You really need a video card with it's own
dedicated memory and it looks like you are using Vista's basic driver for
it, instead of a driver from VIA or PCworld. I understand you may be on a
budget and you got the best you could afford, but in the case of the video
card, "you got hosed billy you got hosed."

I'm guessing that you're older system had a better video card. Intergrated
video cards are good for basic computers, but when you mention gaming, they
are the suck.
I believe your specs say you have a open PCI-E slot, for as little as $50
you can get the nVidia 7300. It's not going to set to speed records, but
will at least let you play HL2 and other games, alot better than what're you
playing with now at that
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010380048+4026&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=48

 

[Guest]

well my old computer did have a nvidia geforce but its agp , and my new pc
can only take pci-e , but im wondering before i waste my money , is it
deffinatly the graphics card causing this

OH and ive got vista via drivers, no differance

 

[Paul Smith]

What sort of price range are we looking at here?

The minimum requirements for Windows Vista is 512MB of RAM, so they
shouldn't even be selling that system. The graphics card is woefully under
powered too.

I'd seriously consider going back to PC World, quote a few bits of consumer
protection laws at them, like the system being unsuitable for the purpose of
which it was sold. And have them put a better graphics card in there Radeon
X1600 should do the job, and put 1GB of RAM into the system, it'll cost you
a bit more, but the machine will be able to play games then.

I'd also suggest Windows Vista Home Premium instead of Basic.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*

 

[Conor]

Last week i bought a new pc from pcworld with home basic on , i was exited to
start playing my games on my much better pc

Then when i installed the games they ran so slow that it is impossible to
play them which is quite bad considering my very old 800mhz athlon k-2 slot
computer could play games better than my new Intel celeron d 3.33ghz computer.

Plus even worse i cant load any Half-Life 2 games off steam this is
basically any game on steam using the hl2.exe, when i try to load hl2.exe i
just get "hl2.exe has stopped working"

But the slow games is most important

Can anyone help me please?

Yes.

Try buying a proper processor. A Celeron is OK for general use, i.e
Word, email and web browsing, but its bugger all use in gaming.

 

[Conor]

well my old computer did have a nvidia geforce but its agp , and my new pc
can only take pci-e , but im wondering before i waste my money , is it
deffinatly the graphics card causing this

OH and ive got vista via drivers, no differance

You need 1GB RAM.

 

[Guest]

I must differ. I have Vista Home Premium, 2 Gig ram, AMD Athlon 64 x 2 and
Nvidia GeoForce 6150LE and a 320 Gig drive and none of the games that ran on
XP or 98SE, even Quake II, Half-Life, Heretic none of them will even install.
Once I get past all the windoze popups about Installing from an unknown
author, and getting my permission to do the first thing I wanted - to
install, I get a popup from windoze offering 2 choices, end the process or
search MS for a solution- which so far, has done nothing to provide a
solution for any of the problems. Vista is just XP with a new face and more
problems.

I've probably searched for 50-60 solutions because Vista can't handle the
simplest of installation instuctions. The only thing that works is, solitaire.

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

Please take a look at your thread on this. I suspect you don't have the
nvidia release of the drivers, and openGL is still spotty. But it works
great on a ATI card

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

Well, without touching it, I don't know that anyone will be able to
absolutely confirm it, but you could buy the $50 card from newegg and if it
doesn't work, you would have to pay a 20% restocking fee to send it back,
granted that's $10, but at least it's not $50 if it doesn't work.

I can't imagine the integrated card being worth a nickle's worth of dogmeat
for gaming.

 

[Conor]

I must differ. I have Vista Home Premium, 2 Gig ram, AMD Athlon 64 x 2 and
Nvidia GeoForce 6150LE and a 320 Gig drive and none of the games that ran on
XP or 98SE, even Quake II, Half-Life, Heretic none of them will even install.
Once I get past all the windoze popups about Installing from an unknown
author, and getting my permission to do the first thing I wanted - to
install, I get a popup from windoze offering 2 choices, end the process or
search MS for a solution- which so far, has done nothing to provide a
solution for any of the problems. Vista is just XP with a new face and more
problems.

Still using pre 100.xx versions of nVidia drivers?

 

[syngyn]

There's an old saying. You get what you pay for. I hope you didn't pay
much for your PC.

 

[Guest]

I have had the same problem with some of my games. First off, vista is
incompatible with older games. Games for the windows 98 and such. Second,
make sure you have all the updated drivers for your vid card and vista. Then
go to the game site and download the latest patch for the game. If your
computer still wont run the game, right click on the desktop icon, go to the
properties menu, and put the game in Compatiblity mode of XP and click run as
admin. Then right click the desktop icon and click run as admin. If this does
not work, I am afraid the game might just not work on that machine with vista
as a operating system.
If that is the case, then download and run Linux as a second partition to
run games with. Let me know if this helps at all.