Framerate Issues

[catbarf]

Hi, I downloaded the demo and decided to give it a try, but I'm having issues. Specifically, a horrendous framerate. I have all the graphics down to minimum, and it's manageable when I'm at the start of the tutorial. However, once one of the pillar-looking things or that huge ball come onto the screen, it drops to around 1.5FPS, and is unplayable. I am using an AMD Turion 64 Mobile running Windows XP at 2.19GH and with 960 MB of RAM. I am using an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M for graphics. This is enough to run Half-Life 2 on highest graphics with 25-30FPS, so I don't know what the problem is here.

I intend to buy this game if I can sort out the graphics issues. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and the intro movie is also really choppy, but the main menu is absolutely fine, if that is any help.

[catbarf]

Update: I updated my driver to Catalyst 6.9 and it is a little bit faster and the intro is fine, but with anything more than a few ships on the screen (including the warp-gate-thingies and huge floating balls) the game lags like hell. Is there any way to fix this?

[noah3d]

Game should run fine on yours configuration. If lowering down ALL graphics settings to low didn't help try to assign more memory to your GPU. I'm not quite sure but from your description you have integrated GPU on your motherboard and you should give it more memory if possible (from your description I assume that you assigned 64mb) . Genesis Rising is hungry for graphics memory and 64mb is not enough to run smoothly. Again I'm not sure that this can help but you can try.

[catbarf]

I've never really tried fiddling with my settings, how should I do that and what are the risks/drawbacks? Also, what are VSync and that other option I see in the demo options screen?

[noah3d]

VSync = Vertical Synchronization - if it's off game will run a bit faster but you will experience "screen tearing" effect.

Aspect - This is the aspect ratio of your monitor if you set it to correct value the game should look more pleasant.

SkyBox - option should be on if you notice artifacts in the background which can be seen if anti aliasing is turned on.

Texture/Geometry quality - lower settings means less memory occupation but game will lose on the look and probably run faster.

Shader quality - game with lower setting should run faster on lower end GPU's but it will lose on the look.