Tribes 2 running like ass

edited August 2019 in Support
Since my old videocard broke and I switched to my "new" old 2011 GTX 560 TI, Tribes 2 has been running like Crysis on toasters, making the game unplayable.

I used the same install folder that worked fine on my old card, but just to be sure I reinstalled the game anyway and got the same results. The result is about 10-15 FPS when looking anywhere in the distance where many objects or effects are seen. Just looking outdoors instead of directly at a wall or the ground makes the game run like a slideshow. Now, this may be an old and weak rig, GTX 560 TI, i5 2500, 8 GB ram, running on Windows 7, but hell, it runs new games on low settings at playable framerates. It should definitely handle T2 with no problems.


Things I have tried so far to fix this:
-Decrease the visual settings in the game (runs a bit better but still bad)
-Enable/disable all kinds of visual settings, changed resolution, etc, no major difference spotted
-Disable/enable vsync either from the game or the nvidia control panel
-Set the T2 game profile from the control panel to run at maximum performance and have forced antialiasing/anisotropic filtering (to force the card to use power power)
-Reinstalled the game on a different HDD, reinstalled the game with the bare minimum of scripts that always worked fine, reinstalled with no scripts
-Reinstalled Windows 7 (64 bit)
-Tried with and without affinity.exe and even manually setting the core for T2
-Ticket compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3 for Tribes2.exe, ran as administrator, etc.
-Updated video card drivers
-Tried switching from OpenGL in the game settings but there's no other option besides that


I play all kinds of games, new and old, and they all run as they should depending on how many bells and whistles they have. Except Tribes 2... it runs at unplayable framerates when in combat. Now, I thought the video card has problems but this is the only problematic game when it comes to FPS lag. Am I missing something here and this PC is actually too weak/bottlenecked to play Tribes 2? Does anyone have any recommendations for me besides what I have already tried? Thanks.

Comments

  • Hmm, odd. That was a common hardware setup a few years ago, and shouldn't have an issue running the game at a very respectable framerate — with the possible exception of forcing high anti-aliasing settings.

    Are you using the drivers from the nvidia site, or from Windows update, and what version does it say?
    If you try running the game in a window with the task manager open (and possibly something like GPU-Z), what does the load look like on both the CPU and GPU?
  • edited August 2019
    Krash, you made me have second thoughts about the drivers. I was using a pretty recent version now (391.35). But, I didn't think about rolling back the drivers.

    I took a look at the GPU usage like you said, and it seemed quite normal, about 10% to 40% max, but the core clock was being downclocked to 50 mhz even with that gpu usage. I thought that setting the game profile in the nvidia control panel to maximum performance would make the game run at the max core speed. And it did, but it still ran like trash somehow.

    So I googled a bit more about low gpu usage and driver versions and... I found this thread. Apparently people using the same video card had problems with downclocking, especially in older, non-intensive games past versions of 378.92, which is like 2 years behind the current version. I gave that old driver version a try and... voila! It's running smooth now and not going over 50% usage. To think this has been annoying me for so long... Thanks for the idea!
  • edited August 2019
    Ah, good to hear it's working. Figured it might be something like that since they've dropped the ball on support for some older cards over the past few years, but wasn't sure where the driver sweet spot might be for that one.
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