Computer bogging down...down...dooooowwwwn

[snwod]

Hello folks. :)

I have ATITD running on an AMD 2500 XP+, 512 MB RAM, Asus A7V8X-MX mobo, Radeon 9200SE, with SUSE 10.0 as an OS. When I first started playing this, two days ago, the game ran perfectly fine (considering the low-end video card). I played it for a while again yesterday afternoon without a problem.

But I tried running the game in the evening and this morning, and it just sucks up the processor power of my computer, making everything slow to a crawl. Also, I can't do anything on the ATITD screen...it locks up, the music jumps and pauses, none of the message boxes scroll anything. I basically have to close the program, which also takes a long time to do. After it closes, things get back to normal.

Is this a problem on my end? Could it be my internet connection (512K Cable)? Any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

PS: Didn't know really where to post this, so I thought Linux would be OK since that's the OS I'm running...

[Pluribus]

Some people new to linux dont realize that some patches will trash any "propietary" drivers that may have been installed... Try the following:

Open a command line (your choice)

glxinfo | grep -i direct

If it says Direct rendering: no then you need to re-install your binary driver from ATI.

Regarding the patches... Particularly most things that patch xorg or XFree86 will generally break the ATI driver... (As well as kernel upgrades because the driver is tied to the kernel it was built for)

Second Note: ALL of the closed source drivers will do this. So Nvidia cards are no better in this regard... My suggestion is that after ANY xorg/XFree86/kernel upgrades that you get in the habit of re-installing the video drivers. This may not be your issue, but it is a good likely first thing to try.

Oh, I forgot to mention, It is normal for it to try and render as many FPS as possible... (Hence the high CPU usage) NOTE: You CPU is more than sufficient to run the game, other possibilities is that something else is also dragging down the CPU... (If your video drivers are fine) Firefox sometimes runs away with the system as well (Quit the client, run top and see if anything else is using large amounts of CPU... RAM starvation will also degrade performance alot. Yes, the client does want 300+ MB of ram... that is also normal.

[snwod]

Thanks for the reply Pluribus.

Things seem to be working OK now. I don't really know what the problem was...

Anyway, I tried the command you suggested, and got a "yes" reply. So, I think my drivers are OK.

That's pretty much it, I guess. Thanks again.