Dungeon Siege Rant

M

mindbend

Registered
Just bought Dungeon Siege. Performance is crap (averages 20-25fps give or take depending on scene). And that's with minimal settings!Loads of hiccups and stutters. Garbage.

Tried on two machines:

DP 1 gig (non-mirrored door), 1 gig RAM
DP 867, 768 RAM

Both OS 10.2.6
Both with GeForce4MX

I'm curious if anyone else is getting better performance, perhaps with a different video card.

I find it completely unacceptable for a developer to ship a game that can't sustain 30fps or better on mid-range machines. Shame on them.

I am finding the game borderline unplayable, and I think I have pretty solid machines, if not cutting edge.

Argh!!!
 
Apparently you don't realize... Dungeon Siege is pumping a *lot* of graphic detail onto the screen. It can get away with using such high details because high fps are not so necessary in a rpg/rts as they are in a fps. I enjoy the game very much even though I am a fps gamer (and therefore an FPS whore :p ... gotta have 90+). I suggest you bite down on your frustration at the crap hardware Apple feeds us and just enjoy the game...
 
Things to keep in mind:
Dungeon Siege is a game that doesn't necessarily require 30 fps min to be playable.
DS is a fairly demanding game both CPU wise and with the video subsystem. The GeForce MX cards don't have some of the hardware features that would alleviate some of stress DS puts on the cards. Ghost Recon barely gets 30fps on a high end Macs yet its probably the most highly played game on GameRanger.
Mac OS X doesn't provide a method for apps to hog the CPU like OS 9 and Windows can.
DS was a very technically challenging port. The original PC version used a lot of DirectX technologies and other Windows features. All things considered, as with many ports there's bound to be some performance hit in the translation.
 
I played Dungeon Siege on my old PC quite a few months ago and it was a great game. My hardware at the time was a P4 1.8GHz, 768M RAM, Radeon 8500 64M, and 18G 10krpm SCSI. It ran flawlessly...even in the swampy board with tons of baddies. :) Now...playing DS on a Celeron 1.7GHz, 512M RAM, onboard SiS video, 40GB 7200rpm IDE I have now still gets me about 30fps unless there's lots of action. You might want to grab a new video card if you REALLY like the game. The video card is the single most important piece of the puzzle when gaming...on any platform. You can get Radeon 8500's cheap now. Thinking about it...DS did run pretty crappy on my Inspiron 8200 which had a GeForce4 440 Go 32M which is based off the MX core. Perhaps there's something in the game that lends itself against nvidia cards. I know MOHAA gimped out at ~20fps on my Radeon 8500 on the D-Day board. ...just my $0.02...

- G!mpy
 
After restarting my machine once my new low-end settings were in place, it turns out that performance is at least acceptable, averaging just over 30 fps with only the occasional hiccup. Unfortunately, I had to bottom out at 640x480/16 bit/bilinear/no shadows/minimal object detail just to get this mediocre. Fortunately, the game is designed well enough that even minimal settings still look pretty good. I personally prefer smooth over quality, though I'd love both.

I won't even get into the lameness about how I should not have to restart the app or the computer to "flush out" whatever garbage causes it to choke.
 
From what I've noticed in every game I've tried, shadows cause a significant performance hit, particularly volumetric shadows. I'd say that's the biggest performance hit out of the DS graphical settings. I haven't restarted my computer since 10.2.6 came out and all my games perform about the same as usual. Always make sure nothing else is running in the background. Filesharing can impact performance.
 
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