BF2142 Problem (BF2 Engine in General?)

Here are my complete system specifications:

Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83ghz
2gb DDR2-667mhz RAM
Mobility X1600 256mb dedicated GDDR2
Mobility Catalysts 7.2
Windows XP Home SP2

Description of problem: Any game based on the BF2 engine do not run well on my system. As known 2gb of RAM really helps out the BF2 engine. Yet, I experience extremely poor performance on my system when others with similar, lesser specs experience better or smoother performance.

I have read the BF2142 and BF2 tweakguide at tweakguides.com and optimized everything but i'm still getting crappy performance.

I have Dynamic Lighting and Shadows to low and have tried off, and light to low and still my performance is basically the same.

I tried using the presets to low, medium, and high and I get bad performance on all of them, roughly only gaining 2-3fps by going down a preset.

Now, I know that this cannot be, how? Others report much better performance.

As an indication as to how wrong this is, is I can play Oblivion with med-high settings at 20+fps and that is way more graphically demanding and a not so well optimized direct console port.

CSS/HL2 at runs 35+ FPS with everything maxed, including HDR, 4xAA, and 8xAF.

MII:TW also runs fine on medium-high.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and anyone who helps will receive rep as this issue has never been resolved.

Again thank you.

 

I have heard that the BF2 engine is more processor-intensive than most other current games on the market. Although I somewhat doubt it, your processor may be a factor in all this.

 

Well I kinda fixed it.

I reverted back to stock drivers from June 2006.

Thing is these drivers have some bugs in the game which were fixed in later releases.

The game runs fine now with these drivers, but if I use newer ones it runs like crap, but they contain some bug fixes.

 

yes BF2142 is using a the BF2 engine with minor improvements.

 

Lets face the facts people, DICE just poorly coded the BF series, if they spent more time on making the game playable and less time producing expansion pack! I believe its mainly EA fault due to them being a cash cow. Also, we all played games that are graphic intense and yet somehow it always runs better than BF2... end rant.

 

Hey I noticed the same things with the new 7.2 drivers, BF2142 ran WORSE for me on the 7.2 then the older 6.12, not to mention ATi did something weird or its reporting the wrong specs for my X1400. Time to revert back.

 

Yeah newer ATi Drivers are rubbish! Well, were - the very latest ones are fine. But I used drivers for my X1950Pro when I first got it, and older ones gave me a 70% performance increase over the 'current' releases!

Battlefield 2 might have been demanding when it first came out - now, not so much anymore. Any popular benchmark tests for cards, although they always include it, equally they always fly on BF2 (even the considered mid range or low range cards) and typically get bogged down in FEAR or Oblivion - it's wrong to still use it as a milestone today, although people still do it...