Picked up Front Mission Evolved on Steam yesterday, though this is one of the first times I'm regretting not buying the console version instead. Now, I have to confess not knowing too much about PCs but I do what I can to try to make sure my drivers are updated, most recent directx, etc. But for the life of me, I can't make this game run without being choppy. I guess I have a general frustration nowadays with games that don't have their own built in stress tests to determine optimal settings. So part of the issue is the need to manually fiddle with the video options, worse yet, if you try to fiddle 'in game' you have only limited options, mostly brightness. You have to exit back to the main menu. There you have more options, resolution, sync, anti-aliasing, etc. But in order to even have the game register the changes, you have to completely exit the game and restart it, but then you can't tell until you get 'in game' at which point if your settings aren't working, you have to exit back out to the main menu and make changes and exit the game entirely, restart...etc etc etc.

Running a Rad HD 5770 on vista, 3gigs of ram with a intel i7 2.67 not top of the line, but its been more than enough to run all my recent games Dawn of War 2 Chaos, Starcraft 2, Mafia 2, etc at full ratings with no issues. Heck, the problems I'm having now are reminiscent of the problems I have when trying to play Elite Force 2 (star trek game from the earlier 2000s), bad framerate, no foreseeable ways to fix it.

Anyway, the game itself has been enjoyable, when its not crawling. Its making me fear what will happen with my Fallout New Vegas, as I've also pre-purchased that via Steam. My fault I suppose, thinking that since my rig is probably so much better than my x360, it should be able to play the same damned games well

Keep in mind that XBox 360 games are programmed with the console's specifications in mind, the coders know exactly what hardware it'll run on. PC games are different and thats why you generally see minimium and recommended system requirements.

Something to keep in mind

You may also want to try updating your motherboard and your graphics card to the latest available, failing that you may have to drop your video settings for the game down.

Well, your hardware is certainly way ahead of what the recommended settings say (from a quick google search the game is not very demanding).

Bye
Thanee

What resolution are you running at? Dropping that will generally give you a significantly large boost in frames per second, presuming you aren't already too low. Like you said a 5770 isnt top of the range, but can easily play majority of games around, so you should not be having an issue unless you have all your graphic settings at maximum, or like you've tried to double check, a driver issue or such.

Anti aliasing isnt necessary, it just makes things look smoother, so feel free to drop that right off, that gives you a bit of oomph back, and sync can sometimes cause issues, perhaps turn that off.

Maybe, your issue is VISTA! Wouldnt be the first time


Btw I'm dying for Fallout Vegas

A 5770 might not be top range, but it is still upper class, and way ahead of the recommended 3850.

Anti-Aliasing could generally be a problem, though. I usually just turn it off completely. It costs a lot of performance for (IMHO) marginal gain.

I'm using Vista as well, and had no problems with current games so far.

Bye
Thanee

I'm a little sad I can't run it at my preferred 1680x1050 setting. At the moment, I've got it at 1280x1040, low settings on shaders and whatnot, low shadows, anti-aliasing at x2. Its tolerable, but not perfect. I tried pushing down to 800x600 but didn't notice much improvement so cranked it back up to a bigger setting.

As a side note towards the game itself, having played the 'strategic rpg' sorta thing the previous versions were, playing this 3rd person shooter is a different experience. I'm not saying its not fun, but its different. Though it does make me want to hook up my dusty ps2 and play FM #4 again. I do regret Front Mission #5 never made it here from Japan, it sounded interesting.

Have you tried with this disabled?

Bye
Thanee

"Well, there's your problem."

But seriously, Vista is notorious for how horrible it is. It is especially bad when trying to run games on it. If you look back at system requirements for a game, they would have different requirements for XP and Vista, and Vista would always have at least double the requirements of XP. Might want to try upgrading to windows XP. Could also go to windows 7, it is alot better than Vista as well.

Easier to get 7 than XP nowadays (which is a shame, I enjoyed XP, though 98 was--well, I'm getting nostalgic over software), and it actually isn't that bad. I'm picking up my upgrade copy tonight since the campus has the 64-bit version in finally.

1280x1024 tends to be a sweet spot for resolutions on PC games.

--



It's notoriously bad because people are morons. I've had 0 issues with Vista running games that haven't been commonly replicated among other operating systems.

LOL Vista.


Also, getting the machine to run software is part of the hobby of PC gaming. You have to do internet research to find out how to make everything run. Here's a project for you: play Shogo on your computer.

Ha! Shogo. That game was wonderfully confusing, storywise.

99% of PC gaming issues with Vista were the result of two major issues.

Lack of driver support for the new kernel architecture NT6.0 (something that Win7 didn't have to deal with being NT6.1). I would be surprised if there are any legitimate PC gaming issues with Vista that aren't equally culpable on Win7 since they share the same Kernal version (much like Win2000/WinXP). Note that Windows XP when running the NT6.2 kernal (64bit) also suffered issues with lack of driver support.

The second major issue was the morons that left Aero enabled when running games when the computer hardware wasn't sufficient to run Aero and anything else.

"moron" is a pretty harsh term there... not everyone knows how computers work.

Bye
Thanee

I would like to point out this is a console port. As an avid PC Gamer, all too often that means for games developed in that fashion that they are less than optimized in more ways than one for the PC experience, usually most evident in a couple of areas, such as GUIs that are meant to be used with controllers rather than mouse and keyboard and texture packages that are meant for the resolutions tvs can support (this has changed a bit with HD but not by much). Other times, it means they have ridiculous frame rate drops in certain scenarios or just straight up freeze/crash to desktop.

From my Steam library, a few games that were not developed with the varied builds of PC in mind IMHO but ported there anyways:
- Fallout 3
- Jade Empire
- Mass Effect
- Saints Row 2
- Star Wars - Battlefront 2

So, it doesn't surprise me that yet another console port is an afterthought. Freely distributed community made content sometimes makes up for the failings of these games, sometimes.

Oddly enough, when I googled your game that I hadn't heard of before, there were a few forum postings posting reporting that all console versions were experiencing bugs and performance issues as well, might just be a badly optimized game period, so you might be jumping to conclusions about PC gaming based on anecdotal evidence/limited sample size, especially considering you described having a bunch of other games that have worked just fine on your PC.

And you know what? Its a common mistake to think that PC games have to be run at their maximum visual settings, this was a problem in particular for some games that tried to future proof themselves with visual settings for hardware that hadn't been widely adopted by even high end consumers yet ($3000+ hardware), let alone middle end ($1200+) or entry level consumers ($500+) - Crysis is a pretty extreme example of this. Interestingly enough, if you look at the Indy Developer games available or even just those Developers/Publishers that develop for PC first then port that to the consoles like Valve, you will notice that many of them try to have minimum requirements for their games that a Entry Level consumer can play at so they can get maximum market penetration for their product. Visual flash is only any good if the game play is as good or better experience for you the gamer, so don't be afraid to start every PC game at its lowest suggested visual settings and then bump it up from there after you know if you enjoy playing a demo of the damn thing.

So yeah, console ports, different SDK software, different optimization, different hardware, different controllers, and IMHO more expensive games.

Yeah, I love when my PC games have the xbox controls listed for what I'm supposed to do at various times. I mean really, they couldn't even be bothered to make it seem like it isn't just a console port?

Edit:
Vista is still worse than XP at running games. Like I said, just look at the requirements. I remember back when crysis came out, I could run the game on high settings on XP, but my friend with a better computer had to run it on medium with Vista.

A game that runs worse on Vista than XP would run just as bad or worse on Win7. It's the kernel and shell requirements. Vista had 4x the requirements for the operating system compared to XP. Windows 7 has higher requirements than Vista but not 4x.

WinXP - Pentium 233 MHz, 64/128MB
Vista - Pentium III 800 MHz, 512MB
Win7 - Pentium III 1 GHz, 1GB

So if you're running a Quad 3GHz CPU with 4GB of RAM, you would have the full speed on 3 cores and about 11/12ths on the last core, with somewhere around 1/48th - 1/24th of you memory unused. Vista would leave you with 3 cores, and almost 3/4ths of the last core and 7/8ths of your memory. Win7 would leave you with the three cores plus 1/3rd of your last core and 3/4ths of your memory.

In my opinion, if you're running a 64-bit CPU you're better off going with Vista over XP 64bit since there really never was very good support for XP 64-bit. Win7 mostly just improved or added some new features.

Heh, don't remind me about the controls for this game. I definitely understood it was developed as a 'console focus' game when the tutorial basically goes, "Use Precision Sniping to enter Precision Sniping Mode"....um...what? What letter is that? Is it the mouse 3 button like I'm used to in other games? Nope...well, lets just jump to options and look up my control keys....wait...i can't look up controls while i'm "in game"? I have to exit out to the main menu first? That seems....fun.

I'm hoping I'll have a better experience with New Vegas when it unlocks in a couple weeks, from what I've seen Fallout 3 seemed to do ok for other people on PC, I have fallout 3 on X360, but wanted to give it a run on PC, in the odd hopes that down the line community generated content will be available. While my 360 experience has been pretty good over the years, the one thing I regret is that you can't really fiddle with the game like you do on PC, user generated content, ....patches...etc.

As for Windows, I kinda liked XP...well...liked it in comparison to Vista. Nowadays I find stuff like Vista or other upgrades to be kinda like phone upgrades. All I WANT is a phone that can make calls, have a good battery life, etc. Yet my carrier options usually have that as a minimal option, its almost mandatory that phones need to connect to the internet, have touchscreens, video cameras, or click-out keyboards or such...oh and only like 3 hours of 'talk time' on their batteries. Vista is ...pretty...and there do appear to be some useful things, but I had to go in and turn alot of stuff off just because it made everything ...hmm....too busy? too much stimuli?

No the bigger issue is how it handles the CPU and memory alication. A game will run better on XP than vista on a same spec PC unless its a DX10 only game as they won't run on XP but even they there are DX9 hacks for them and the same stands. Vista chews a lot of resources to run as an OS. Win 7 however is lighter and a better OS on the base levels thus it can run games as good as if not better with the new DX software than an XP rig on the same specs. Vistas gamings issues are due to it being one resource hungry OS.

As of Vista Service Pack 2, there is no big difference between Vista and Windows 7 anymore anyway . .
As of yet, i have found exactly 2 things that will reliably generate a bluescreen of death on my vista pc.
Thandor - The Invasion and removing my DVB-T USB Stick while watching TV via that same USB Stick.
Else, it works like a charm.
I even can run things on my second screen while playing without losing any Performance . .
Well, okay, maybe i lose some performance, but that is only 2D, when the PC is allready running in 3D.
So the loss is, at best, marginal. Tried running the INSTALLER in compatibility mode for XP for example?
Believe it or not, sometimes this does, indeed, help with some stuff. Also, check if there's any updates.
And not for your drivers, but for the game itself. Console Ports are basically Beta State when sold . . .

That amuses me so much. Then again my PC just developed a faulty page-file as way BoSing due to memory overflow.