Issue running in windowed mode

[gemigemi]

My graphics card on this computer has been the HD4890 while I've been waiting for nVidia cards to get in stock here in Finland. I have had no issues running Altitude with that card. Today I finally got my GTX275, replaced the older card with the new one and installed the newest drivers (197.77). After this Altitude is stuttering when I run it in a window. The game FPS meter shows a 57-59 fps all the time but the game is still constantly stuttering. In full screen mode there is no problem at all and the fps is a steady 59-60 according to the in game meter.

My operating system is Windows Server 2008 64-bit which has been configured to basically be just like Windows 7. If you are interested in every single modification done I've mostly just followed this guide: http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/. Basically it's just adding all the missing gaming related files and changing some settings to mimic Win7.

A friend suggested that this might be caused by the fact that the desktop in Win7/Server 2008 is rendered with DirectX and that in addition to the game (which was OpenGL, right?) might be causing the problem with the new card/drivers. Any ideas? I'd very much like to continue playing in a window.

[lamster]

Yes, Altitude uses OpenGL, but it really should work just fine with an Nvidia card running stock drivers. Please try the test version from http://nimblygames.com/test/altitude.exe and see if that works better.

You may also need to play with video driver settings (disable triple buffering, disable/enable vsync, etc).

[gemigemi]

Forgot to mention that I'm playing through Steam, although that shouldn't affect the situation.

The test version you linked to first started up fine and downloaded the updates, but after the update procedure restart the game keeps crashing when it tries to start up. I submitted the report from the crash once in case it sends you more useful information.

I remembered that I have access to another computer with the same video card GTX275 (slightly older drivers) and the same Win Server 2008 operating system (other components are different) so I tested Altitude on it and it had the exactly same stuttering problem in windowed mode.

I will try to play around with other options a bit later and I'll post here to let you know how it goes.

[gemigemi]

Okay, I played around with the card settings a bit. So far forcing vsync off removed most of the problems. The game is not stuttering constantly anymore, but it still doesn't feel 100% smooth.

If I can't come up with anything better I think I'll just have to learn to play in full screen.