Double Agent Graphics Problems

I just got Splinter Cell: Double Agent and installed it yesterday. When I started the game, however, it was all messed up. It's hard to describe, but when using either no special vision or the night vision, the game is completely unplayable.

On the box it mentions notebook cards are not supported, but does anyone know how (if it's even possible), to play this game on a notebook? I have an NVidia GeForce Go 7900GTX if that makes a difference. Thanks.

 

There are many patches circulating around that fix various problems with SC A. I myself had the slo-mo gameplay problem withmy X1600. Try searching for some patch or fix for it that pertains to nVidia cards maybe. (This was one of the worse ported games by Ubisoft, along with GRAW for the PC)

 

I did get the 1.2 patch for the game itself, but it made no difference for the graphics problem I'm having. I've googled quite a bit, but haven't seen any definitive solution to the problem. One thing I found was one person claimed to rollback to an earlier driver, but that wasn't too clear.

I'd expect to find a lot more if this is a wide spread problem.

 

Try rolling back to a pre-90.xx driver, maybe that will help:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

 

Double Agent is a very poor port by Ubisoft; I was terribly disappointed since the previous 3 Splinter Cells had been great on the PC. It is riddled with problems; I had lots of problems getting the game to run well on my machine as well.

 

Ok what i did with double agent was overclock my 7900gs and used the dell stock drivers and now its giving me smoother fps.. I dunno what your core and memory speeds are but mine are 480/800. And i felt tht performance decreased by applying patches and installing new drivers.. As Chaz adviced try rolling back your drivers. I had more crashes with 93.91 and 94.77 drivers particularly for this game! There are no tweaks available for this game. My screens might give you some idea of the fps i'm getting..

 

Thanks for the help. Last night I installed the latest driver from Nvidia's site (I had previously been using the latest drivers from Dell's site which I'll reinstall once I'm done with this game). So the game is now playable, but still terrible. The FPS are aweful no matter how I adjust the resolution AA, HDR lighting, etc... even at the minimum settings it's not good. I'll tough it out though.

It is rather disappointing since I've had such a great experience with the three other Splinter Cell games and overall, I've always loved the quality of Ubisoft games in general. I'm really surprised at how problematic this game is, but at least it's playable now. It's really disappointing too that I bought the M1710 with the best graphics card I could get so I could enjoy games like this, but now I have to deal with this, oh well, hopefully this won't be a recurring experience. Thanks.

 

I still dont understand why your getting low fps... I get pretty good frames even at 720p which is a high resolution.. Did you enable AA or AF frm the nvidia control panel?? Try switching Vsynch off if its on?

 

I think it's a combination of things. I'm currently running everything at the lowest setting possible (640x480, no AA, no AF, vsynch off, low detail on everything, etc...) and the game still drags. The audio, at one point, was ahead of the graphics, it may still be. My guess is the driver I'm currently using isn't good enough to handle the game, but if I use a newer driver, there's bigger problems.
Through some additional searching, I found someone mentioning it could be a multi-core issue. Has anyone else heard of this? They mentioned that by changing the affinity of the application to only use 1 core, it could solve some of the problems. (Specifically, their issue was video playback related in certain circumstances.) I tried using a program from Tom's Hardware to have the game automatically use only the first core, but I didn't find any noticeable improvements. I'm thinking of trying that with the newest Dell driver to see if that helps.
I'm curious to know if anyone has been able to play this game on a notebook and have it look good at all.

Z-cool, are you running it well on your 9400? If so, what driver are you using? Thanks.

 

OH MY GOD!!! Thats it! ! I cant believe i forgot tht! Yes you hv to change the affinity to CPU 0... I'm sorry i forgot to mention the most important thing! Do it and lemme know if your running it fine.. Remember to change affinity once your in the menu not before tht cause this thing crashes once you do it before reaching the title menu..

 

Yeah, everything is great now. I reinstalled the latest dell driver and I can run at the 16:9 resolution just fine. Occassionally there's a hiccup that seems to be related to the sound emulation, but overall, I'm very happy. I'm curious how many other programs work better using only one core. Thanks.

 

Some not many... Most of them dont utilize both cores but run fine.. like for e.g. Rainbow six vegas, GRAW, NFS:Carbon... Most Wanted runs better on a single core and i used to change the affinity for it too or else the regular hiccups..