Hardware New(to me) Laptop - FPS boosts help

[jedimaster1214]

I recently got a new (new to me, not to the world. It's at least 7 or 8 years old.) laptop from my dad with Windows XP on it. I downloaded Orbiter, but ONLY NASSP (and its necessary add-ons), onto it. Unfortunately it takes at least 3 minutes to load up a scenario in Lunar Orbit, with an FPS of only 6 to 10.

I would like to know if there is any way anybody could possibly think of increasing my FPS and my computer's speed, without spending any money.



So far I:

• Deleted all of the planets except the earth and the moon from my Sol.cfg.
• Tuned off Local Light Sources, reentry flames, and particle streams.
• Set the max resolution to 12, turned off specular ripples, and cloud shadows.
• Set the MFD refresh rate to 1.00, and the default MFD size to 3.
• Use windowed mode instead of full screen, set the resolution to 933 x 700
• Use Direct3D HAL(VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP), and turn on 'Always Enumerate devices' & 'Try Stencil Buffer'.

The Current installed add-ons are:
NASSP
IMFD
LunarTransferMFD
OrbiterSound

The current specs are:

AVErATEC 3700 series
Mobile AMD Sempron Processor 3000+ 1.80GHz
480 MB of ram. <---:beathead:
60 GB HDD

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

[Alexw95]

i could be wrong but to my knowledge orbiter likes to use a bit of ram upgrading to 2 gigs should make a noticable difference its fairly cheep also (around 20$)

 

[Izack]

What Alex said.

Not enough RAM. You must construct additional memory.

 

[Ripley]

...Set the MFD refresh rate to 1.00...

Maybe that's good for FPS's sake, but how can you ever accomplish a precise manouver with such a high refresh (coupled with your actual low FPS)?

RAM is your cheapest bet, even if you said "without spending any money".

- Unload every unneeded program from your XP boot/registry
- Set it to use the least graphics resources from control panel (for best performance)

 

[marooder86]

I Googled(<- is there such word ) around about this laptop and if I Googled it right then upgrading your RAM might not be sufficient. It seems like it have integrated graphic card and such are not good for any games. You can try add additional 1 or 2GB of RAM but I doubt it will drastically increase performance. It shoud increase the loading speed though, cause now your ~0.5 GB of RAM is shered between OS, graphic card operations on lounched programs.

 

[RisingFury]

Don't bother spending money on that old computer. It's not worth a cent...

Though if you do...
- You probably have a hard drive with 5200 RPMs or less. Upgrading to 7200 will increase loading time. In either case defrag your drive.
- From my experience running Orbiter with only 512 MB RAM (and using the hard drive as memory), Orbiter doesn't lose much due to low RAM, but it does load faster with more RAM.
- Look around through BIOS. Laptops squeeze their cooling systems into a small package and it's usually not sufficient to cool the CPU at full power. Offten the CPU has a cap on performance and can be unlocked in BIOS. Also look through the power options of XP and disable all power saving options.
- AMD have a good series of drivers for their CPU - the Cool n Quiet. I suggest you get those if you don't already have them

 

[francisdrake]

You could try Gamebooster, a small (6 MB) free software that shuts down background processes, performs a RAM purge and then goes to the systray. After quitting the game, clicking on the systray icon will restart the background processes.

 

[Keatah]

I gotta go with RisingFury's comments. It ain't worth time or money unless you are in a space colony and this is the only computer you will ever have, or perhaps you're doing the nostalgia classic computer thing!

Now, let's start banging our heads as we walk down the narrow hallway of computer upgrading! You can vibrate yourself back and forth for hours or days on end trying to find the cheapest and most cost effective performance upgrade, but in the end, is it really worth it? Anyways, if you absolutely must do something I'm gonna recommend some extra ram, I might guess your system is already now using the swap-file when dealing with textures and the o/s and everything else. Here we are fixing a broken design.

Yes, ram is gonna help, it might not get you fps improvement, but it will help your load times and things like that.

Upgrading the hard disk. It would improve load times, sure, but you wanna spend money on it? The fastest mechanical pata hard disk is the HM160HC from Samsung, it gets around 70MB/sec transfer rates and goes for about $55 on Amazon. If I remember, the stock hard disk you have gives you about 45MB/sec.

I might carefully optimize your existing hard drive an place *ALL* the orbiter files at the extreme outer edge of the disk where access is fastest. Make all the files contiguous, and sequentially next to each other. This way, your existing hard drive doesn't have to work hard and you WILL SEE some improvements in load times. I use Ultimate Defrag from www.disktrix.com for this. And I noticed a good improvement when I ran it on my ancient setup.

Many times, performance increases can only be made by correctly setting up existing hardware (assuming it was set up incorrectly or the design was broken in the first place), or by spending money to get faster hardware. And that, in and of itself, is a bag of worms. Because you don't get synergistic improvements when doing one piece of hardware, you have to do the whole shebang. If you have a processor upgrade, then you need faster ram, then you need a mobo to support it, and graphics card to take advantage of that speed. You see?? It all has to come together at once. And today, that usually means a new computer.


FPS improvements need a CPU, graphics card, faster ram, faster motherboard, all together at once!! Otherwise anything you do in that department might only get you 1 or 2 FPS. You have s3 integrated graphics, about the absolute worst it can get.

Load time improvements can come from a faster hard disk, as the mechanical drive is often the slowest component in the pc. Just be sure your pc design is not faulty. By faulty I mean that it has enough ram to absorb the data without having the hard disk have to use the swap file, so to speak.

In a nutshell, upgrading computers for versatility and functionality is very cost effective and easy. Like extra hard disks, printers, scanners, web-cams, that sort of thing.

Upgrading for performance/speed is usually the worst and hardest to do, it is also the least cost-effective. You get the least bang for your buck. And proper performance upgrades entail replacing many parts at once.

btw, is this your laptop? http://www.larwe.com/technical/av3715-open.html

 

[Alexw95]

I just built a pretty amazing computer for under 500$ i had a case already (30-70$) mid range mother board(forgot how much it cost) intel i5 quad core(70$ my dad works for intel i got a discount) ATI Radeon 4650 graphics( 99$ future shop had a amazing deal and 4 gigs of ram ddr3( 60$) i can run black ops and stuff on high with 90 fps

if your thinking of getting a new computer look around i waiting about 2 weeks looked online and everything eventually you will find a deal that you can work with

 

[Linguofreak]

I'm not sure you'll ever get NASSP to run well on a computer with those specs. I've run Orbiter in general with even slower and less beRAMed hardware, but NASSP has fairly high requirements.

 

[Keatah]

Gamebooster, eh?? I've never been one to try software solutions such as this, but I am curious to know what is meant by "intensifying processor performance" and "cleaning ram". To me that sounds like a complete joke, those last two items.

I can see and completely support the idea of closing un-necessary processes to free up a bit of memory, or stopping a virus-scanner or something else from stealing cycles. yes. that might work a little, with some poorly written background tasks.

So I am downloading it now to see what it will do with my Pentium III 1.5GHz with 1GB ram and geforce-4 AGP 2X system. On this system is only the necessary processes to get windows started. And the drives are pretty much empty. By the way, the memory is PC-100, yeh, pc-100, and the soundcard is ISA, as well as the 56K modem. It has a 3com NIC and some extra 1394 drives. Running on XP.

This is sort of like an old test pc, a sandbox for legacy applications. And I think it would be a perfect testbed for gamebooster. I really wanna see this processor get intensified!

As my first test I shall load orbiter and see how long it takes to start a basic scenario, I will run the tests 1900x1200x32, and place the xr-2 near the big-wheel station. with the station taking up much of the right side of the screen, and earth taking the left side. External view with xr-2 in the center.

Let's see what shall we do here, ok, Let's try the test with 512MB ram:
1 minute and 12 seconds to load, and about 36 FPS.
Now let's try the same test with 1GB ram:
47 seconds to load, and about 36fps.
So adding 512MB ram gives me about 26 second less load time!
It does nothing for the FPS count.
In terms of disk access and loading doubling the memory from 512 to 1024 knocks 1/2 minute off load time. I strongly suspect that is due to less page swapping and nothing else. A good solid measurable increase in performance. Technically, we are correcting a design flaw in the system. You see. We are speeding up nothing whatsoever. We are just giving the hard disks less work to do. Everything is plodding along at the same old 100MHz system bus as before, and the CPU is blasting along at 1.5GHz, as before.

Now, let me get game booster running and see what we can see, rumbling sounds, parts falling out, noise in the shop, :compbash2::download:, ok I have it installed now. Let's see what we can see!

Alright, with the 1024mb config and gamebooster running, there was no change in load times, still took 47 seconds, and FPS remained at 36fps.
And now The 512MB config also took the same 1 minute and 12 seconds to load, with the framerate still stuck at 36fps.


So in my particular system, game booster did nothing. I wanted to see some intensification going on in my cpu, but apparently I missed that.
Gamebooster did, to its credit, temporarily free up 33megs of additional ram from unloading my itunes and daemon tools drivers as well as some windows internet services, things like that. It also said it defragged some 23mb of ram. Whatever that means. I can't imagine a program as complex as orbiter not creating its own ram fragmentation. And any little ram fragments are generally hidden by the L2 cache anyways. I exited gamebooster or turned it off, it seemed to restore all the processes it killed and the memory-used-by-windows went back up to the former pre-test value of 154mb. So it seems to work solidly. And it installs and uninstalls cleanly.

The premise upon which GB is made is based upon you starting off with an overcluttered and thoroughly unoptimized system. The few windows processes that run the background don't take much resources, as evidenced by their removal, yet no FPS increase. Most well behaved background tasks just sit around drinking beer and not doing much. So that plan of attack is worthless. I can see it being useful if it stops a scanner or some other resource hog.

In this particular system I will guess *MY* fps is being limited by the graphics card, and more specifically, the amount of video memory. Seems the CPU and memory subsystems are more than adequate. Furthermore, large textures slow this test system to a crawl. Once they get big enough.. Vague description, yes. but the point is that once the video memory gets full, the fps drops dramatically. In lightly loaded scenarios I'll get more than 60 or 70 fps. The video memory, in having to have data sent to it over the system bus, is the bottleneck here.

So you seem depending on the balance and system design, you may have one component bringing you down. In your case, I will tend to say it is the integrated s3 card and small amounts of main memory. I have just proved to you that a memory upgrade will speed up load times. You might get a 1 or 2 or 3 fps more, but that depends on how bottlenecked the igp is. Probably not too much is my guess..

Your cpu is sitting around not doing too much when playing orbiter. So that is not a problem, neither is your system bus speed. Your memory and graphics are the reasons for slow performance. Memory for load times, graphics chip for fps. Simple as that! One you can possibly upgrade, the other you cannot.

My recommendation is easy, get more ram for faster load times, or get a new computer for faster FPS. Your call.

 

[TSPenguin]

I basically used the same laptop for quite some time and I orbited on it. It wasn't pretty or particular fast, but enough for a quick fix now and then.
Forget addons like NASSP, they will kill your experience. Flying the XR class vessels with 2D panel should be perfectly fine.

This was in 2006P1 with level 10. Load times are crap, but that is to expected, and as your tests showed, are not related to FPS.
I believe you can easily double or tripple your FPS by letting the IGP use 64MB of RAM as VRAM. It currently uses 32 and that is just too little. The constant shoveling around of data for each frame is what is keeping you in the unplayable area. The setting should be in the BIOS.

P.S.: As mentioned above, more RAM will speed up load times but not FPS. On my old laptop I could set it to use 128MB as VRAM. Something you could possibly use with sufficient RAM to even make NASSP enjoyable.