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Originally Posted by Reaver
There really is no excuse for a game to launch with this laundry list of problems. Really. One or two, maybe, but all that? Not on your life. Especially with it being such a high profile title. They damn well should have known better. I won't buy it and reward them for their lack of effort or concern.
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After reading some of the forums, I think I have solved the framerate issue. It seems those with 128mb RAM XBOXes (i.e. modded or Debug Kits) can play the game with a perfectly fine framerate.
Therefore, I postulate that GlyphX optimized the game for a 128mb debug kit instead of a 64mb retail XBOX not realizing the hardware difference!
A few things to consider:
* The XBOX debug kit has 128mb of RAM. It is possible they did not fully test the game on retail (64mb) XBOXes, optimizing and thinking all ran great on the 128mb debug kits. Remember, this is the first game GlyphX has made a game for the XBOX, they might have thought the debug kit was the same specs as the retail XBOX.
* If this is the case, that the game was optimized for 128mb of RAM, the problem is not easily fixable at this stage in the game, though it is fixable to some extent. The most feasible option I can think of is making the way assets load more dynamically to minimize memory usage, however this would require a lot of work. Prior to the game being released, they could have reduced the filesize of textures or split up maps in order to fit everything into 64mb, but this would be too big of a download for a patch. Still, more dynamically loading assests is possible and would be the primary way to fix this problem since it would be a small patch.
* Since the XBOX uses the Windows kernel and has a hard drive, it is likely that virtual memory is available to games. With this the case, if the game is programmed to use say, 100mb of memory, only 64mb of that will be physical RAM, while the rest will be on a swapfile on the HD. If this is the case, the reason some may see lots of slowdown while others see only some may be due to the speeds of the individual hard drives in each XBOX (they are different). Also, if one XBOX's hard drive is more fragmented than another, this could also lead to worse performance with virtual memory. This would also explain why the levels slow down at the beginning, because it is copying the stuff that is supposed to go into the 128mb of RAM that XBOX does not have onto the hard drive's much slower virtual memory instead.
Sounds like a pretty big goof up but I would not be at all surprised considering how the game turned out.