Performance concerns

[abd]

Penumbra performance is very good in my experience. I have quite old pc with GF4 Ti4200 and I haven't been able to run any new games for ages with decent framerate. Doom 3, for example, was really impossible to enjoy (fps was something like 10 without any optional eye candy). And I could run this Penumbra demo easily at playable speed (in linux through wine!) . Maybe it is some of the effects which needs all the juice (motion blur etc.)?

[Peeling]

I'm wondering if it's bottlenecked on something other than GFX - because I can't see any reason for the 8800 to choke at all.

Anyway - no biggie; looking forward to the full game.

[DukeIt]

I have the same problem. A geforce 6800 512Mb and an E6600 and it really chokes on Overture. It's still playable though.

[eduarte]

Peeling wrote:
"Overture performance isn't *terrible* or anything, just nowhere near as smooth as one might expect."
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So, Is no doubt, search in your computer about the Gremlins, is migth have some 17 of them at least. And becarful, dont trow wather in them!  The problem will be worse!  :-P

[jngdwe]

Makes no sense at all for Overture to lag at all, it could probly run at over 35 FPS easily on a 2800+ AMD with a geforce 5 series card easily, and thats saying something for a newer next gen game! My current computer with a Geforce 6600LE 256mb (300/400MHz clocks) and AMD athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz 512kb L2) with 1.25gb of ram runs the game on max settings and 1024x768 res fine, with motion blur turned off. It even runs extremely playable on my moniters max resolution. I like to play at about 800x600 for extremely performance, and 1024x768 for performance WITH good looks.
Overall its about 40FPS in my current settings at that res.

And btw, both my CPU and GPU are screwed over heavily from some overclocking accidents, yet they run this game smoothly and without any drops in performance. doom3 ran at like 17-30 FPS average, and it had worse gfx than penumbra. Seems that frictional games did a wonderful job in my eyes.

[Thaliur]

Sometimes, a sound card can brake your whole system (yes, brake, not break, though that might happen too ).
Especially OnBoard-Soundchips tend to look like hardware sound processors, but really leave most of the work to your CPU, or, if they are actual hardware sound processors (in terms of environmetnal effects and directional audio), they could lack calculating power, so slowing down the whole game.
I had a similar problem in the King Kong game, where the game would slow down to a slide show when too much stuff happened at the same time.
In Penumbra, I experienced a dramatic framerate drop after I turned on the generator until I left it's room, but the rest of the time, the game ran smoothly even on highest settings.