nwg

Hello Folks,

Got a good fast graphics card but it has <512MB of on-board RAM? You can't set the game to the great looking ultra settings eh? Try this hack which was originally posted on the TWC:



Works a treat on my old AGP 7600GS with 256MB.

Cheers, M.

looks very simple to do
But with things i really don't understand I'm pretty reluctant to give them a try.
However i guess that the worse that can happen here is that your game will not run properly or at all and you just have to simply change back to the original setting ??

Just keep a copy of the original file before you modify it - thats what I do.

Those reading this who have Nvidia 8800 cards with 320MB RAM will have more than enough grunt for excellent graphic results but the vanilla game will rob you of this ... give the above a try, you might be surprised. Also been reports of excellent results with Nvidia 8600 cards (most of these are 256MB).

Cheers, M.

OK Moopere i have saved a copy of the preference file, and made the approriate changes, will let you know if there is a noticeable change in tonights games.

I'm not 100% sure, but I have a distinct feeling that the 29/4 big CA patch might have fixed this. I noticed last night that my laptop, which has an 8600GM with 256MB all of a sudden allows all the texture settings (up to Ultra!) which was not the case before.

Worth a check before getting tangled in the configuration file mod.

Cheers, M.

Ha ha, i went to play ETW last night and forgot all about the changes i had made.

Thinking about it now the 3v3 game we played ran very smoothly with no lag what so ever,

I changed the setting in the preference file after the latest patch and it was showing gfx_video_memory 0;
would this be different if CA has fixed it
Anyway i have just checked my options settings and automatic is now putting everything on high when before it was medium.

Its interesting this. Must be some hard coded stuff that we can't see. On my 8600GM the game has now changed so that I can use Ultra settings if I want (previous vanilla I could not do this). However, on my much older (AGP) 7600GS I need to fiddle the config file as detail in the OP or else I can't go higher than Medium graphic settings.

I'm pretty sure that the latest patch improved FPS issues as I'm getting playable FPS now even on the older 7600 and am using ultra unit textures (to get rid of sprites! I hate sprites!).

Cheers, M.

I have a nVidia 9500 at 1289mb graphic ram.
Yet I have to run it on medium for 4v4 and high for the rest. I'll give this a try and see if it works.

And for Vista you go to the Users folder for anyone who didn't know.

Hmmm. I think there is a hidden gotcha in using this hack, makes sense too when you think about it.

The story goes that I recently retired my 5 year old P4/3Ghz with Nvidia AGP 7600GS 256MB in favour of a PentiumD 3GHz with an Nvidia 8600GT 256MB that fell my way.

Now, the PentiumD is no where near as optimised as the Core2 Duo, but nevertheless, with 2x 3GHz cores I was hoping for a significant increase in FPS on this machine over the previous HT but single core Pentium 3GHz.

After much fooling about I was getting quite frustrated. I couldn't see any increase in framerate... in fact, things felt slower than the previous system. Whats going on? Well, it took a week of messing about, and some serious overclocking by the way, but now things are good and stable at 20FPS+.

The trick is that when you use the hack above you are fooling the game system into thinking there is more texture memory then there really is. Windows / DirectX doesn't care and is able to handle the discrepancy by swapping textures in to and out of the graphics cards on board RAM as required - however, the catch is that this swapping about is incredibly slow and was limiting my battles versus AI to <10FPS. What to do then? I want high quality unit textures because sprites drive me completely nuts, however I am less picky when it comes to almost everything else. The way to get this to work (for me) was to keep all other texture based settings to low, make the unit textures Ultra and thus keep the amount of graphics RAM required to a reasonable level.

If you are suffering this problem yourself you will know it by the fact that your men will all appear to be running in slow motion. Reduce the texture memory requirements by turning almost all texture settings to low and you'll be on a winner.

Its still a nice hack to use because you get the benefit of cool stuff like volumetric effects which make the smoke look a heck of a lot better. My card, the Nvidia 8600 is quite a potent unit and has plenty of onboard grunt, but just not enough memory.

Hope this helps someone.

Regards, Moopere

Well I used this hack on my 1024 mb 3.16 ghz computer but It only seemed to work when I put it on 512mb or 536870912 as in the text above. It work fine. Its great; 4v4 works now and its almost cystal clear! I've set the units, texture and ships to ultra and the rest on high which allows 4v4 to be almost perfect! Thanks again!

Long time since a posting; but if your preferences reset then you need to make the file read only. Otherwise anytime something changes some files may reset. However, ifyou read only this file you will not be able to change your game preferences as they will not over write because it will not save. At least until you uncheck read only which will make the file save the ingame setting.