Undsoft's blog

In this post I’ll try to cover most common and widespread technical problems that may prevent you from playing Mirror’s edge, a great game created by Digital Illusions and published by EA.

I’ve personally faced some of them, while others were reported to me by readers of my original Russian blog.

Before we start

Some of the problems that are described further may be outdated. The general thing you should do before reading such posts as this one is to go to the official game site and download the latest patch. Seriously, this solves a lot of problems.

So, before you continue reading, make sure that you have the latest version of the game.

The second most common source of errors and glitches is a bad game crack. If you are using one, go ahead and find a better version buy the game.

Faith is sooo slow

It may happen to you on third or fourth chapter of the game. Faith starts to move very slowly — you are not really able to play the game. Mouse sensitivity slows down significantly, you cannot jump, run or punch. All you do is walk around at a snail’s pace.

This happens only if Faith is moving. If Faith stands still, game works normally: you have no problems rotating camera, jumping or punching.

Sounds familiar?

This is an example of problem known to be caused by a bug in the game crack. You already know what to do with that.

No sound in the cut-scenes

The sound is muted in the game intro, back to normal in the menu, and then again there’s no sound in the first chapter cut-scene, but sound is fine when you play the actual game.

As far as I know most often this problem is reported by Windows 7 users (Me being one of them).

But I’ve managed to solve the problem. Firstly, you need to download Creative ALchemy Universal. Then install it, run it and create a new profile for Mirror’s Edge. Settings for this profile are shown on the picture:

After you’re done with this, move the newly create profile to the right column. That’s all — you may play now and sounds should be there. Just make sure that you have hardware acceleration selected instead of software emulation in the game settings.

I have a powerful graphics card, but still sometimes game slows down greatly

For example, you run away from cops across the hall with large windows. Cops shoot at you and window breaks into thousand of small pieces. Framerate drops to 5 frames per second. Game runs so slowly that it’s almost impossible to play.

The root of all evil is PhysX, special engine that is indented to perform physical calculations to create additional visual effects. PhysX is utilized by Mirror’s Edge to render falling pieces of breaking glass.

You won’t have any problems if you have GPU that supports PhysX (modern NVIDIA cards). In this case the GPU will take PhysX calculations upon its hardware.

But if you are a lucky owner of ATI-AMD card, all PhysX calculations will be performed on your central processor resulting in low framerate and game slowdowns.

All you have to do to fix the problem is to turn PhysX off in the game settings. Fear not, your game experience won’t suffer. Except for windows that will break up not that beautifully.

P.S.

If you experience additional problems (or know some other solutions) I encourage you to use comments at the bottom of the page.