MrCat on 11/3/2015 at 14:50
Hi there folks,
I recently upgraded to windows 7, had some grief after deciding to install thief 3 DS again but finally got it working. I did experience stuttering tho and verging on not enjoyable to play due to being slow. I have made it playable now by (as seen on other threads here) selecting just one processor core. I can't run it on a really good resolution tho without it being a bit too slow and stuttery.
I'm a bit confused tho as when I had winXP on this system I'm sure thief ran much better and all that's changed is my OS. Can anyone explain that one?
I'm running an AMD Athlon II x2 245 2.9Ghz, 1GB ram (767mb usable), and onboard graphics Geforce 7025.
It's not an amazing system but I'm sure should be able to do much better than it is with such an old game. I have the sneaky tweaker installed too but am not using anyting on it just now as it just seems to slow everything down. My thief version is 1.1.5
I've edited the default.ini [Engine.GameEngine] CacheSizeMegs to 1024 as I also read here somewhere and I'm not sure there's much else I can do?
It is playable but would be nice if I could get the resolution higer and use the improved textures which at the moment seem to make it fairly unplayable.
I'm also curious just out of interest why it runs better on one processor core than two, I know little about that kind of thing and it's maybe not an appropriate question for round here :) ? I've played it with the full hig res textures installed and a good wide screen resolution before on a lesser processor. It's maybe just my GPU letting me down?
Cheers
Yandros on 11/3/2015 at 15:41
Well, Win7 probably uses significantly more memory than XP did, and you only have 1GB of RAM where I would consider 2GB the minimum to run Win7 effectively. Plus the onboard video is probably the reason for much of the issues you're having running it smoothly. However, I'm not a TDS person (haven't played it in 10 years) so others may have more concrete suggestions for you, but to me your RAM and video are clearly at the root of your problems, OS aside. You can get a decent video card for well under $100 these days, and even a $39 card would be better than onboard with respect to this, I would think.
MrCat on 11/3/2015 at 16:23
Thanks matey, pretty much as I suspected. I did buy a 'decent' graphics card a while back but had to send it back again as it was (after some research) apparently an old card hence being cheap (£30 - $40 or $50...?) and had compatability issues with 'newer' motherboards. Just no way to make it work. I will save up for something better tho. I'm fairly bottoming out in terms of windows 7 specst too yea but thought I could get away with it!
Anyway thanks for the info, I just thought maybe I could keep being cheap and there was something I was missing :D
Cheers...better go save up.
swaaye on 11/3/2015 at 22:31
DXIW and Thief DS are surprisingly demanding indeed. Even though they are pretty ugly by today's standards and look fairly simple, the real-time shadows consume a lot of GPU fillrate.
Don't go too low even with modern cards. Look for something with 128-bit or 256-bit GDDR5 memory.
