I am going to try Vendetta on a PIII 500 mHz w/ 256 MB RAM and a 8 MB nVidia video card, is it possible to get vendetta to run at a decent speed?

The greatest framerate increase you can get out of tweaking is obviously graphics. Under the "graphics" menu, change the scene level of detail and distance level of detail both to 19 (or whichever is the highest number). The higher the number, the lower the polygons that are rendered. Secondly, turn backgrounds and space junk completely off.

Then go under the "video" menu and run the game at the lowest resolution possible (in 16-bit), textures should be set to their lowest setting, mip mapping should be off, and finally turn illumination/environmental/bump mapping all off. If it's playable then, you're good to go. You may even be able to up the graphics a little bit from there. If you're having trouble with the absolute minimal settings, you've got no other choice but to upgrade or buy a new computer.

Let's be honest, any 500MHz processor is considered dated by today's standards. An 8MB video card also won't get you far with today's games. Granted a few people have managed to run Vendetta below the minimum system requirements, it's not recommended since the game has not even been finalized and will most likely contain additional content which may further increase those requirements. But for now see if any of the above drastic tweaks help to at least give you a taste of what Vendetta Test is all about.

Hey, I still use a 450MHz Pentium 3, although it has a GF4 Ti4600.

Anyway, yes, your biggest win will be turning off environment maps/bump maps, setting texture resolution to lowest and using 16 bit textures.

This may sound like common sense as far as most people are concered, but terminate as many processes as possible on the machine to allow it to devote as many CPU cycles as possible to the game.

In windows, just make sure as few systray icons as possible are loaded and all running programs are terminated. NT based systems ( NT4 / 2k / XP ) should also be sure to deactivate all unrequired services, as these chew the CPU as well.

Linux and Mac OS X users should pull up a terminal and make judicious use to the ps and kill commands. Remember to be careful about what you terminate.

You'll probably get the best performance on a minimal linux installation, simply due to the fact linux will let you run a minimal GUI configuration and chop out most of the bloat the OSes force you to use.

Well, I took some of this advice into mind and I have vendetta to be rather playable, I got it to be a stable 30-40 FPS with decent quality settings =)

I ran Vendetta on my Laptop (Mobile P3, 667mhz, ATi Moblity Rage Pro, 8mb). It used to be fast, until that 'new' s9 station came... But before that new station, I had a few n00bish fights in s7, getting 3-7fps near the station, and around 30-60 when looking into space. It was fun :).

For more FPS, you can also turn off background in the Video Settings.

Gizzard: find an unused runlevel (4 on most systems), get rid of all tty's but tty1, have it init startx, with vendetta the only process under xinit. Have nothing under /etc/init.d except ethernet startup scripts.

you should have the standard processes 1-9, X, and vendetta.

it's a bit drastic, but it beats killing off unnecessary processes.

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