Slow Play

[Master Magician]

The Steam version likes to "go slow" at random times, running the entire game, whatever table you happen to be on, at about 75% speed. Maybe even as slow as 60%. The ball goes slower, the scoreboard animation is slower. But the music and sound fx are normal. This switches back to 100% also at random times. Cant find any commonality. Is it a program running in the background I should disable? Cant think of what that would be

 

[netizen]

Ideally you should always make sure to minimize your background processes.

Have you tried reducing the reflection or AA settings in the Config utlity to see if the slow down still occurs? Maybe set it to play in a full screen window instead of full screen, that seemed to have some performance affect on systems for some people.

 

[Jeff Strong]

What are your hardware specs?

 

[Fungi]

There was one time, and only one time, that TotAN just spontaneously slowed down on me to what seemed like 50%. I'm not talking about frame skipping, I'm talkin' pinball as if underwater. I thought "great, I'm gonna milk this for the Harem goal!" But as soon as I locked a ball, it went back to normal. Never happened again.

 

[utblick]

It´s probably a memory problem.
Close down all webb browser windows and all other active programs/apps.
If this does not help, try stopping some background processes.

 

[norbert26]

It´s probably a memory problem.
Close down all webb browser windows and all other active programs/apps.
If this does not help, try stopping some background processes.

i have had this happen from time to time. its not memory task manager tells me no more then 50 to 55% of memory used. System specs are above what was called for and zen pinball runs fine.
EDIT: the 3 big culprits are CBW, STTNG, and class of 1812 when this happens.

 

[Master Magician]

What are your hardware specs?

HP Pavilion dv6 laptop
4 GB RAM
AMD Phenom(tm) II Dual-Core Processor 2.80 GHz
64 bit operating system
Windows 7

My computer keeps getting the latest upgrade pack. Once a day everyday. I let it install, then the next day there's another. I know that excessive downloading will slow my stuff down, as does Norton, which seems intent to scan every 30 seconds
My boy has the same problem on his laptop which is only 6 months old, running windows 8. Slow play at random times. He plays MM exclusively. My games are TOM and CV.

 

[Biff]

These days when we talk about games, the most important hardware is the graphics card.
After that CPU & RAM.

 

[norbert26]

These days when we talk about games, the most important hardware is the graphics card.
After that CPU & RAM.

im thinking the shortcoming is in the graphics card . at the time i bought the hardware gaming was not a thought. since its only a few tables i will live with it most of the tables are fine. i can always play those couple of tables on my iPad.

 

[norbert26]

UPDATE: issue is resolved. Open the configuration thing. Choose window mode. Choose full window mode full screen at the bottom of that menu. tables will display the same as they did in just full screen mode and problem is gone ! (turn off PP and ball reflection if you need to). in my case ball reflection is fine. i do have PP off.

 

[Mike Reitmeyer]

When I'm doing development (I run in windowed mode) if I get any notifications, like new email, etc. The frame rate drops to 30fps. I'm not sure what causes it, something with windows hogging resources I'm guessing. Usually goes away after 5-10 seconds.

 

[norbert26]

When I'm doing development (I run in windowed mode) if I get any notifications, like new email, etc. The frame rate drops to 30fps. I'm not sure what causes it, something with windows hogging resources I'm guessing. Usually goes away after 5-10 seconds.

I turn off / exit the email client when gaming and close any browser windows .

 

[superballs]

If using an on board graphics chip then the chip simply uses system memory instead of it's own dedicated memory. An expansion gpu has its own bus between it's processor it's memory and only offloads the results of it's calculations to be processed to the cup or memory, whichever is most appropriate. On board graphics share the front side bus with the rest of the data and can easily saturate it. When task manager shows 55% memory is in use it's only showing the total memory being addressed. Not how much of the data bus is being used up. You can have a lot of free memory and no throughput left.

 

[Kratos3]

It's funny, I tried TPA on my PC and it ran so slowly as to make it totally unplayable.

However, I was playing with the camera angles, and once it got to the highest overhead shot, it runs like a champ! So much so that I thought it was running 2x speed. I turned off any and all graphics processing, but that was before I played with the camera angle. I'm going to try turning some of them on one by one to see what my PC can do. The mouse controls are pretty awkward, but I do have a controller or 2 I could try....

I have to admit, TPA on the PC is pretty nice.

 

[Tann]

That's why this guy plays in "slow motion"...

It can be useful when the ball goes crazy on some tables (Genie, Taxi)...

 

[Fungi]

That's why this guy plays in "slow motion"...

It can be useful when the ball goes crazy on some tables (Genie, Taxi)...

OMG this guy is so clueless I had to stop watching.

 

[Naildriver74]

OMG this guy is so clueless I had to stop watching.

Somebody put him out of his misery

 

[ronnijhof]

how is it possibel
half of the tables speed is good also with multiball
and half of the other tables i buyed is slow
4 mb ram video 210 nvidea 1 gb i3 3,07
everything clossed en also game booster to stop backgrounds

before i will buy a differend videocard i will know if it is not a steam problem

 

[Kratos3]

Somebody put him out of his misery

That was painful....

 

[neilpinbot]

My laptop seems to be struggling more since the new build. I have tried some of the new graphic settings but set it back to my old settings because it was playing slow. But now I seem to have slow down (mostly in multiball) where it used to play fine in the past with the same settings. I also now have long pauses after pressing the start table button to the table kicking in.
using
PP off
4x AA
ball reflections low.
My laptop Is an HP with 1.6 quad core. AMD with on board AMD HD graphics. 4 gig ram. So not very powerful but it did use to play TPA at a solid 60 fps before with the above settings.