Bioshock retail much slower than demo

I just bought the the full retail version of Bioshock and I was stunned to find that it was running really slow compared to the demo I had downloaded earlier. The demo had run very well on mainly full settings at 1280x800. If anyone knows why this may be or has a solution it would be much appreciated.

My system is in my sig.

 

i think it's because you have more graphics settings to change in the full game? I wouldn't doubt it if the full version looks better than the demo (just as unreal tournament2004 demo compared to the full ut2004 version)

 

Pray tell, why would they make the graphics look worse in the demo? Considering the demo is nearly 2 GB to download, you would think that they would want to impress the potential buyer as much as possible. They certainly aren't saving on bandwidth... What else is there to save?

 

Agreed, also the demo was released right before the full game. With all these complaints about the game running slower than the demo I am starting to hesitate about buying it.

 

Oddly enough, the full game seems to run faster then the demo did on my comp.

 

Perhaps there was some late optimisation done on the demo, which is coming in a patch for the full game. The problem is that the full game had to have been with the publishers for some time before release, since they had to master the DVDs etc, whereas the demo could have been worked on until the minute before they finished compiling it (or whatever) and put it online.

 

This seems to be a common complaint. I think I will wait for it to be resolved before I pick it up. Until then you can't go wrong with F.E.A.R.

 

That's strange. The graphical options in the demo and retail game are identical - and for me at least, they both perform identically too (as they should - the demo uses the final game code). Did you make sure to disable Vsync? That might be causing your framerate to be artificially limited.

 

Try defragmentating. The full game is almost 6GB, so fragmentated files will hurt performance more.

 

i second the defrag suggestion. i remember when i first installed ut2004 a few years ago and how slow it was compared to the demo, but after a defrag it was smooth again.

 

Maybe the demo simply has fewer enemies to render than the full version. I've also heard that the levels in the demo are cut-down versions of the same in in the full version.

 

Might be the drivers too. If there were internal game references to "Bioshock Demo" that now became just "Bioshock" the drivers may no longer detect it properly meaning the optimizations that were added are disabled. One way or another it'll probably improve with time.

 

Well, that would be very short-sighted of ATI and Nvidia

 

I managed to solve the problem. I reinstalled the demo and it was also dropping frames like crazy so I just turned the comp off and left it for a while and when in came back it was fine. I was just a little impatient

It wasn't actually a problem with the full game if any of you are hesitant to buy it. It is absolutely incredible and now I find it is running just as well if not better than the demo. All the graphics options are the same so that should be understandable.

 

Excellent game huh Unique design, beautiful environment, great gameplay.

Hacking is kind of fun, oddly enough....the "easy" ones so far seem challenging, especially with the timer.