Can anyone slow me down?

[SirBob]

I have just installed Painkiller Black (Version 1.6)
I have an Athlon 64x2 dual core 4200+ processor running at 2.21GHz. RAM is 1 Gig. OS is Windows XP (SP2). Vid card is a GeForce 7900.

The introductory video graphics are great and are running at the correct speed. However when the game starts my movements are too fast and monsters come at me at silly speeds. I can find no way of slowing down the gameplay. Can anyone help?

[PeTjA]

Read the post from Varus (http://dreamcatcherinteractive.com/forums/showpost.php?p=188396&postcount=4) (thx) here.

[SirBob]

Read the post from Varus (http://dreamcatcherinteractive.com/forums/showpost.php?p=188396&postcount=4) (thx) here.

Well whoodathoughtit!! That second processor was the problem. Many thanx PeTjA.

[deviantopian]

I have the same problem described by SirBob but I don't have any kind of dual core processor. Here's my spec:


Dell XPS M170
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX
Intel Pentium M 2.26 GHz
1GB RAM
SigmaTel C-Major Audio

So can anyone slow me down?

[deviantopian]

I found this thread aswell: game runs TOO FAST ! (http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28678)

Apparently it's something to do with the SpeedStep (http://www.bay-wolf.com/speedstep.htm) technology in my Pentium M processor.

There is a program that will give you a certain amount of control over the speed of your SpeedStep processor - SpeedswitchXP (http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html) - but it doesn't seem to manage to hold it at one fixed speed - the game will slow down and speed up at seemingly random intervals.

The only effective way I have found of getting the game to run at a constant sensible speed is to disable SpeedStep in the BIOS. Of course this means restarting my computer every time I want to enable or disable it. Which is not ideal.

If anyone has a better solution, please let me know!

[Varus77]

Indeed - that are the reason for your problems.

All you need is CPU on const. max. performance, even not switchable. That tool doesn't enable this?

[deviantopian]

Yes the program does have an option for keeping the processor at its maximum speed, but it doesn't seem to work. For example... I have it on that setting now, but CPU-Z (http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php) is showing that it's only running at around 800MHz when its maximum speed is 2.26GHz.

Having said that, I don't think maximum performance is what I want - that's when the game runs too fast. Switching SpeedStep off in the BIOS lowers the speed to a constant 800MHz at which the game runs correctly. However, using SpeedswitchXP alone to set the processor to 800MHz doesn't help - the game does run closer to normal speed but keeps slowing down and speeding up.

It seems to have some correlation with what's going on in the game at the time. If there's a lot going on it will run at a fairly normal speed and sometimes even go into slow motion. When I've killed all the enemies in an area the game speeds up again.

[Varus77]

In some normal differences that last would be normal but sure...that wasn't your point.
Right...constant speed is needed for correct time triggering. Therefor I thought max. speed would be the best but maybe not...
Sorry...I haven't another solution...

[deviantopian]

Sorry...I haven't another solution...
Thanks for your responses anyway... much appreciated.

I think I may have found a better solution. After hours of searching Google and trying out various applications that claimed to be able to control my processor speed. I stumbled on this thread on another forum: GPL Power Monger - for laptop game speed issues (http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=236740). GPL Power Monger is designed to make Grand Prix Legends run at a decent speed on SpeedStep enabled laptops. Its author says "it starts a thread at low priority to take any available idle CPU time away from the processor". This stops SpeedStep slowing down the processor because it thinks it's not being used.

So I tried it out - ran GPLPM.exe, right-clicked the tray icon, turned off Automatic, right-clicked again and clicked start.

I then ran Painkiller and it ran at the correct speed!

Much less hassle than restarting my computer every time I want to play Painkiller :cool:

[Varus77]

Ah...very nice founding and thx for posting it. (For other after you... :) )

Sometimes it's difficult to find the right solutions especially then if I don't own this hardware by myself.

Then all I can say...Happy Fragging :D and Welcome between Hell and Haeven ;)