AO with Nvidia

Hello. I recently got a new computer 100x more powerful than my last one. how ever, i'd say that AO probably runs 50% worse on this one than it did on my old computer. I know it has to with AO not using the graphics card and with Dx7 and what not yada yada yada. anyways, I'm going to post my system specs and I want someone who is more of a nerd than I am (i'm a music nerd anyways. and no, not a band geek) to tell me what I should do to increase my frame rate. seeing as my processor is faster on this new computer, i really don't see why my frame rate should be lower than it was before. anyways, here they are.

Windows 7 - x64
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M460 @ 2.53GHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M460 @ 2.53GHz \ listed 4 times so I
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M460 @ 2.53GHz / assume thats a quad core?
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M460 @ 2.53GHz

I think thats just about all the stuff that matters. if i missed and important piece of hardware, let me know and i'll throw that in here.

I have very similar configuration (windows7 home edition instead of 64) and I have no problems whatsoever.
I play dual logged 99% of the time and I get 70-80 FPS which is more than enough for me.

I would try checking/updating drivers as well as playing with AO setup for start.

Does your PC have nvidia's Optimus technology? In that case you might want to make sure that it actually uses the Geforce 460 and not something else, like integraded intel GPU.

Well I have tried messing around with the video settings in the AO launcher. There are the 3 "Primary Display Driver options (3D Hal what ever that means), and then there are the 3 Nvidia options. When ever I try switching to one of the latter, the quality just drops like hell and my resolution shrinks. Is this supposed to happen?

That's quite interesting. I've got an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M, but the configuration for AO only shows "Primary Driver" twice and my integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics 4000) twice, no mention of the Nvidia.
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/6164/graphicsa.png

I'm currently using the integrated as my primary with no problems, normal 50+ fps in all places (100 in shops :) ) Also, use the Direct3D HAL option, seems better (for me at least)

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/9743/aovideosettings.png

here's what mine looks like.

guess its time to make a back up of my prefs folder and then start playing around

update: I used the 5th option on the list from my screen shot and I am happy to announce that AO is running much much better. Absolutely no noticeable difference in frame rate between newland and jobe.

The 5th option is the correct choice :) Direct 3D T&L HAL is Transform & Lighting Hardware Accelleration, which is the major workload the GPU handles for AO. You could also, with an advantage, choose 32bit colors in the previous menu, game will look nicer that way. Gradients will look smooth instead of grainy.

yeah i run 32 usually... i must've had that turned down just to see if that improved the framerate at all. now its time to play with the nvidia settings themselves to make AO look even nicer than it does now (oh the irony...)

I had issues getting anything but MSAA to work on my Geforce card btw.

You might also want to run the game at the native resolution of your monitor for example if your monitor is a 1080 which means 1920 by 1080 your games should be at the same resoulution as your native monitor res. It makes a huge difference. If you have a 27 inch monitor and play at 680 by 480 your crazy :-)

yes i believe i am running at native

In this thread on post #7 I linked information to what resolved my problem with my new laptop running AO like crap (http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...d.php?t=602367)

I bought an Alienware m14xr2 which performed poorly with AO until I made the mentioned changes to insure the dedicated graphics card to be used over the onboard.