WTF, MOHAA weirdness ...

Well, I try to play MOHAA on my rig (specs in sig), start a multiplayer game, everything is fine and smooth at 800x600 high details and all. Then, I go and tweak my V3 drivers a little, and activate 3DNOW. I reboot, go back in MOHAA, now everything is super choppy and all, I mean, everytime I'm in a big open area, the framerate drops far, far below acceptable levels. (so much that I had to lower all graphics, play at 640x480 with details lowered to the minium to keep a constant framerate). I change that setting back (the 3dnow, I deactivated it), go into the game, increase all graphics, and it's super smooth. WTF ?!? Isn't 3DNow! supposed to actually increase performance and multimedia capability, and not decrease it ?!

dont use 3dnow then? maybe its conflicting with the video driver or something.

How'd you enable 3dnow anyway????

garasaki said:

How'd you enable 3dnow anyway????

Click to expand...

No kidding, please list your system that you are having the problems with. By V3 you dont mean Voodoo 3 do you? If so, then there is your problem. It only has 16 megs of ram, and most likely is barely handling the game anyhow. By enabling 3DNow (which should already be on) you are most likely disabling it and that is what is causing your problems. Either that, or you are actually enabling anti-aliasing and that is what is making you unplayeable. I have a Voodoo 3 also, they are amazing cards in what they are still capeable of being able to do but the 16 megs of memory just isnt enough for todays games.... especially with anti-aliasing turned on.

His specs are in his sig. Everything, with the exception of the video card, looks like it should work fine with MOHAA.

You might as well just keep the settings that work well. If it ain't broke...

I'd like to know how your enabling/disabling 3DNOW though.

I downloaded some Voodoo3 drivers for Windows 2000, that have some tweaking options. In the OpenGL/Glide section, there was an option to enable or disable 3DNOW. It's originally disabled, and the game runs fine. Then, I set it to Enabled, and it crawls ....

Then I would say to leave it where the game works at. I wouldnt imagine that 3D-NOW would be disabled by default though. 3D-NOW was AMD's version of INTEL's MMX, and I cant imagine that it would be shut off. What OS are you running? Because 3DFX's programs where optamized for windows 98, and may not work correctly in newer OS. I really do not have any other suggestions since you are working with a 3DFX video card which quit offering support two years ago.

yup, if its not broken dont fix it!

3dnow was orginally created to try and give some more FPU performace in games to amds K6-2 line of cpus. because the K62 had nearly half the FPU performance of a simlairly clocked P2/celeron
When the athlon (K7) came around it had superior FPU performance to the p3 so the 3dnow is basically useles but still provided a little performance jump.

And BIG RED is the man. If you have anymore questions about your problem he would be a good one to PM.

dang just get a new video card! radeon 9500 is only 200 !

SpliT71 said:

dang just get a new video card! radeon 9500 is only 200 !

Click to expand...

but only 200 is still a lot for a job-less student . Also, I jsut spend a couple hundreds building up this new rig, so I don't think I'll upgrade for some time now, at least until I get some $$.