:cry: The Quaywest Advanture Park project may have to be released in it's current state for RCT:3, leaving only the full park avaliable for RCT:1. The reason for this? Well, it's simple:

RCT:3 RUNS SO SLOWLEY, BUILDING RIDES AND TESTING THEM IS UN-BEARABLE

In short, I got lag, and loads of it. Placing each piece of track is taking some 30-40 secconds, and same again to delete it if I don't like it. Game freezes up when I try to tunnel underground for about 2 minutes, and placing track pieces underground is a nightmare. It takes so long. Hours pass, and you build your coaster, and hit the yellow light to test it. Woah, don't look now but thats your coaster crawling along at 1 FPS, so getting ride stats becomes a chore in itself. The list just goes on, and it's becomming a real pain in the *** to do what I want to do with the park.

So, I turn to the community to see if anyone can give me a few pointers on how to make things run a little better. System spec is below (not thats it's a crappy PC) for reference, as well as in game settings:

Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz
ATI Radeon X850XT PE 256MB (AGP)
1024MB PC3200 RAM
Abit AI-7 Intel "Springdale" Motherboard
SoundBlaster Audigy 2
2 X 160 GB Seagate SATA HDD's, Set up in Raid 0
Windows XP With SP2 + all other updates installed

RCT Settings:
Res: 1024x768x32
AA: None
Ansio: None, Using Trilinear filtering instead
All LOD sliders are in the middle
3D Trees are on
As is water reflection
And High Quality ground textures
Bloom is off
As is the laser occlusion option

Game is patched with the new Wild! patch avaliable. Soaked and Wild packs are installed, as is the Steelworx mod.

PC is more than fast enough to run some really mad games at max detail, and high res (1280 X 1024 X 32). An example of this would be Need For Speed: Most Wanted, uber high res, detail maxed out = 70 FPS average. The best I see from RCT:3 was 15, and thats because the park was empty. It's worth noting that also, when the game is paused, FPS is in the 30's, un-pause it, and it's always on 1. Same is also true if your building a ride while paused, it will stay at 1, but go to about 30 as soon as your done building.

So, any advice on the above, please feel free to comment...

First thing I would suggest is to read this forum:
http://rct3x.co.uk/myBB2/showthread.php?...40&tid=921

1) I would than suggest to update your graphics, sound and   motherboard drivers.

2) End any unnessery programs that are running. (msn, firewalls ect)

3) change the rct games res from 1024x768x32 to 800x600x16

4) Where the graphics settings are in the games options menu theres an
icon of a moniter that says auto detect. Press this and the screen may go blank for a few seconds. Pressing this will let the game determan the best settings for you pc to run the game and automaticly change your settings.

5) Scan your computer for adware, spyware and viruses. I would recomend programs like xoftspy and microsofts antispyware beta program and mainly somthing like nortan.

6) Use both the defrag and disk clean up options often.

I hope this makes sense. But please dont qoute me on these actions helping your rct gaming or making massive improvments in fps.

I've just run a spyware scan, and OMG - Found loads of things. PC spring cleaning session out in full force tomorrow I think...

Lol I would suggest doing the following at least once a month:

1) spyware scan

2) addware scan

3) virus scan

4) Defrag

5) disk cleanup

RCS2K4, do you know how to restore your computer or even heard of it?

RCS2K4, do you know how to restore your computer or even heard of it?

Yes, I am aware of the system restore option within XP, but my PC has so many problems with "dodgy" software, I have taken more drastic action...

I have totally re-format my PC and put everything back in from scratch.

Unfortunatly, the RCT problem is still there. I've noticed that you can max the graphics out, or have them as low as they go, and it still lags when building and riding rides. Frame rate still hovers @ 1.

I'm beginning to think that it's just a really buggy game, and possiably the CPU is acting as some sort of bottleneck. Remember that the game is able to run at the same rate regardless of graphics detail set or resolution run...

Any one got any more ideas?

I didn't mean "System Restore" I meant a total restore -deleting everything off your computer and reinstalling XP. That's what I do from time to time when things start messing up and I can't seem to fix.

Your computer may have came with a quick restore CD-Rom, yes?

Yes do that....i do it also from time to time.When you put the game back on your system, dont max out the graphics.Your system looks more than capable of running the game, there better than my specs, and i dont have alot of problems....

The above problem is now solved

I have been able to pin RCT's problems down to the CPU. In the case of my Megapark, the processor was the bottleneck in my PC. Moving from my Radeon 9600XT to my Radeon X850XTPE in the summer saw only a 2-3 FPs increace in performance while running my Megapark. £350 of graphics munching power only boosting performance by 2-3%, something can't be right, so my investgation began....

I began by running the game at my monitors best resolution, 1280 X 1024, with all the detail options maxed out, and observed the results. At 1024 X 768 the average FPS was 10-15, the same FPS was also achieved at 1280 X 1024. If the graphics card was the limiting factor, then moving up to a higher res would see a performance penalty?

Keeping with the higher res, I set all of the detail options to their lowest settings. To my supprise, I see the same 10-15 FPS, and as before, this also happened at 1024 X 768. Clearly something se other than the graphics card was the limiting factor.....

So, I moved onto the CPU. It was a P4 Northwood core running @ 3.0 Ghz, with 1GB RAM, and overclocked the hell out of it! With the cooler I had, it would only manage stable speeds of 3.2 Ghz, 200 Mhz boost. Lets run RCT again...

This time, at the high res with max detail, the FPS never fell below 13, but never went above 18 at best. A small performance boost there, albeit a risky one...

Already getting suspicious about the CPU holding RCT back, I pushed for even more Mhz, hitting 3.3 Ghz. RCT booted up and for 1 minute at least, was running at 14 FPS. Only one frame more, but shows us that clock speed is more important than graphics horsepower. Then, the PC crashed. That was one toasted piece of silicoln, oops. Off to Ebay I go in a quest for a new CPU that works on Socket 478.

3 days later, my shiny new P4 3.4 Ghz Extreme Edition arrives. There will be no overclocking of this one! Once installed, insantly run RCT at the same high res and max detail, and what do you know....

FPS never fell below 21, and peaked out at 29. Now, thats a performace boost... I was feeling pretty happy at this point that a powerful CPU is more important to RCT than a really fast graphics card...

One dead CPU later and I finally get decent performance levels at max detail, wahoooooooooooooo!

So, if you're still using an AGP based system, and want better performance, you'll need a faster processor above anything else, but at the same time, need a fairly decent graphics card. For example, if you have a Radeon 9200 and a 3.4 Ghz P4, the chances are that the graphics card will be the limiting factor. I think you can see where im coming from...

I'm not sure if the same is tru for users with AMD CPU's. AMd have been faster than intel for some time now, but I would like to see if the AMD's have a performance bottleneck.... I also am not sure if PCI-E PC's have a CPU bottleneck. In these systems, you can have much faster graphics card now, but they may still be limited by a slow CPU? Who knows, but if someone is able to test that, I would like to see the results

Hope this was of at least some help to someone, now that i've got cramp from typing to much...

lol cramp hurts.......

As ive said before RCS2K4 <<<computer genius.

Thanks for posting this info. Im in the middle of building a new pc following the advice you give

so once again thanks for the info and advice.