FPS drop and Lag

[jacques]

Hopefully this will help some people.

First of all, my system specs:
Quad core 2.6Ghz
Geforce 8800GTS 512MB
4GB RAM
6GB pagefile.
Steam version.

I have experienced the FPS drop problem and it annoyed me for a while but I now play the game normally.

At first, I used Windows 7 64bit Ultimate RC and that had nice FPS problems. I tried all the solutions I found posted (deleting steam, cleaning registry, defragmenting, reinstalling steam (new version), or the 800x600 switch, increasing heapsize, various command lines, updated my video drivers to the latest 190.something (though I didn't expect much from that, and didn't want to start looking for lots of driver versions as I don't believe that's the root cause) and ended with the same problem. Start at 200fps, drops to 5fps, enable antialising, jumps back to 150fps, drops again to 5fps. I'm sure people reading this are familiar with all of it.

My hard drive is a bit of a mess right now, with 3 partitions. Each one still has 20+GB free. So, I couldn't get it to work on Win7 64bit, so I switched to Win XP 64bit. Fair enough, I didn't reinstall steam, and didn't try as many fixes, but bottom line it didn't work. My last option was my 3rd partition, Win XP 32bit (yes, they are all legal windows, benefits of being on campus ). Well, this partition was a clean install, so I updated everything with Win Update, latest graphics, motherboard, soundcard, direct x drivers and after the system was nice and up to date, I defragmented it. Then I installed steam, restored my backed up DM and made sure that was fine (checked integrity and defraged it). That's it, averaging 100fps with everything maxed out (no VSync though, will look into enabling that as it is very annoying when you have fire hands glowing on walls!!!).

Now, I am not saying the problem is with 64bit, but it might be worth a try creating a 20GB partition, and installing WinXP 32bit just for DM . Hell, maybe a clean install of any Windows would've worked, but I am not going to try it. Who wants to start formating hard drives?

Well, so my advice is this: If you've tried every solution from this forum, you are on 64bit OS and nothing works, try it on WinXP 32bit (Clean install probably not necessary). Good luck!

[Blín D'ñero]

Hey jacques, i'm glad you found a way around your problem but the cause is definitely not with Vista 64-bit. Windows 7 64-bit an early release candidate i tried begin of this year ran the game excellently as well exactly the same, system in my signature.
XP 64-bit on the other hand is -although i never tried that OS myself- known for its various instabilities with (Source) games, so i'm not surprised.

Still i mention this:

• Huge slowdowns and "The memory could not be read": Virtual Memory fragmentation. Make sure your game is patched (1.01 and 1.02), they contain a fix to help preventing that.
  But still Virtual Memory fragmentation can happen if you never defragment. So: defragment. (Windows XP: Diskeeper Lite (freeware); Vista and Windows 7: Auslogics Defrag 3 (freeware)).
  To defragment virtual memory: disable Paging File (virtual memory) / reboot / defragment / re-enable virtual memory.
• Singleplayer / multiplayer: make sure you have enlarged and fixed the Paging file to 4096MB min and max. See Enlarge and fix your Page File (virtual RAM) to 4096MB min and max .

And this:

ATTENTION (from the 162.18 release notes):(All GPUs, up to 8800 series)

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic–light flickers on the weapons and
characters, and the system freezes after a period of gameplay.[ 260689
260335 260315 262958]

It is not guaranteed this is fully solved in newer drivers.

unfortunately was never mentioned as being solved in later drivers. So i guess you'll have to live with that untill you upgrade to a newer videocard.