trouble with choppy gameplay of D2

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kidcalico

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I have basically run out of options that I know of and have been through Blizzard tech support twice. Looking for some help from anybody out there. I am experiencing choppy game play of D2 that is so bad that it severely hinders play. Have updated all necessary drivers, DirectX, installed latest D2 patch, etc. However, here is the kicker which might give somebody a big hint regarding what's going on. The game runs fine in DirectDraw (2D) but choppy in 3D mode. But... my video card should have no problem running in 3D. On a side note, my comp exceeds all min. requirements, running Win98 (2nd edit). My video card is an NVIDIA 32MB RIVA TNT2. It came with my Dell. Anybody have any problems running D2 with this video card? I know it's still one heckuva popular card and I got my computer back in Feb. 2000. Is it possible that my card was not made by NVIDIA but somebody else? Would this make a difference? I can't be the only one out there who has had problems running with this vid card. Dell probably sold umpteen thousands of systems similar to mine. Also, I installed the latest driver from NVIDIA but still no resolution to my problem. Got any suggestions? Thanks in advance for the advice.
 
There's nothing unusual about that. D3D preformance is almost always worse than DDraw in high-stress situations (though some people have good enough setups that they can ignore it) How much worse varies by card. Nvidias are the worst I have found, especially when you have an old one like a TNT 2. Course a GF3 is so powerful it doesen't matter how inefficiently it is doing D2...

I don't think it's entirely Blizzard's incompetence either. Baldur's Gate games have the exact same problem and exhibit the same advantages/disadvantages with individual cards. Some of the optimizations have left the 3d card poorly equipped for this psuedo-2D/3D style.
 
Still, there are some things you can do to lower the "choppiness". First of all, a lot of RAM will improve gameplay. I now have 256 Megs of Ram, and that truly gave me a difference from my previous 128. Then, close ALL Windows programs except for explorer and systray, then start the game. If you play on battle.net this may cause some choppy gameplay, if you play on peak hours, but there is nothing you can do about that, except for playing in the middle of the night, or very early in the morning, but how much fun is that?
 
I had a 56k modem when I played on SC. Now im on DSL, it goes alot faster. Maybe u just need to change ur connection to the internet. Also try rejoining if you have bad lag, sometimes u will get better connection than others.
 
Thanks guys! It sounds like my NVIDIA card basically sucks. Increasing RAM seems like a good idea. I have already tried closing unnecessary windows to no avail. Also, just thought I'd let you guys know that I'm experiencing this problem in single player mode (I haven't played battle.net) Couple more questions for y'all. When I installed a new driver for my video card, I didn't delete the old one. Is this necessary? If so, how do I do this properly (I'm not a computer whiz, just know enough to be dangerous)? Also, if I get super anal, decide I can't live with playing D2 in DDraw, what vid card would you recommend for playing this game? It doesn't have to be the fanciest. I don't konw if it matters but I only have a PCI slot on my comp. I have a 600 MHz, Pent III, Win98, 128MB RAM.
 
For Diablo 2, you should get a Voodoo 4 or 5 card [or even Voodoo 3] (I think they still sell them)

You can then run Diablo 2 in Glide mode which it was originally designed for (It looks and runs better under Glide than it does under Direct3D)

These cards are basically unsupported since 3dfx is out of business (owned by nvidia) and nobody is writing new games to work under Glide.

But they support Direct3d as well.

If you plan on playing any newer fancier games on that system, then I don't recommend Voodoo. But for Diablo 2 specifically, 3Dfx is king™
 
When you install an updated video driver, the setup EXE file should take care of it and you don't need to uninstall the old one. In the old days, this was a good idea but I haven't had any problems with just running the new driver's EXE file and letting it do the work.
 
Before talking about spending hundreds of dollars into computer upgrading just because Diablo II is poorly programmed, have you tried D2 Accelerator ?

I would post the link but the site is still recuperating. Anyone has a mirror link to it ?
 
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