full radar/panel opacity issues

hiya · Post by **hiya** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 2:24 am

Tonight i got the advice from rb2 to make radar size 30 - full opacity and it was just marvelous, except one small problem; my shitty comp runs it jerkily. I've fidled with various radar sizes/opacity over the last few months and found that my comp lags with any reasonable radar size at full opacity so i settled with 14 on 1 below full opacity. What i dont really understand is why radar at 10 on full opacity lags while radar on 14, with 1 below full doesnt lag, and actually radar at 30 1 below full doesnt lag either (only problem being u cant see any tanks infront of u or even your mouse box for that matter).

I have a 1.5 ghz AMD sempron processor, 512 megs of ram, 32 mb via/s3g unichrome pro IGP vid card on my averatec laptop running windows xp. I've already turned all effects/graphics/quality to the minimum and if theres any way i could possibly get this to run or if anyone could tell me why the hell full opacity makes my comp lag id be very appreciative.

A Meteorite · Post by **A Meteorite** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 2:31 am

One thing: Lag and frames per second are two differnet things. (But I understand what you're saying just don't confuse the terms next time

).

It sounds like your video card doesn't have enough power to render the opaque objects below your radar. It's one thing to render something but then to appy opacity over it is a little harder... I beleive this is the problem. Any more thoughts from video card experts? The only fix I know of is to bring down the settings or get an AGP slot video card.

hiya · Post by **hiya** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:04 pm

ah thanks meteor. I was just checking it out and when i turn opacity to full my FPS shoots through the roof. On my normal settings its around 25-30 when i turn up opacity it shoots up to 90-110 according to the little white number

. Make any sense?

Kooppers · Post by **Kooppers** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 6:24 pm

Well,

When you don't have full opacity, your graphic card needs to display all the activity/texture that are beneath the radar. Hence more stuff to deal with.

While when this is full opacity then this is just a static black pict (exepted radar activity, which is there in all config), so less render to deal with, hence less charge for your grapic card -> more fps.

hiya · Post by **hiya** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 7:12 pm

alright so if its so much easier to render why does it make the game run jerky? could it be because the higher fps puts too much load on my processor/memory? if so is there any way to slow it down?