Performance gaming system?

[cvearl]

I pose a question to you all in hopes that many of you have been down this road already... I have a 64MB G4Ti4200 and wonder if my problems described below require 128MB video.

I just built a system based almost entirely on Alienware's current "Hive Mind" system. (I'm not rich enough for anything bigger). Aside from the case the hardware is the same stuff. I don't overclock though. It's an ASUS P4PE motherboard, Intel P4-2.4, 512MB Crucial PC2700 DDR, Seagate 40GB 7200RPM ATA/100 drive, MSI Geforce 4Ti4200-64MB, SB Audigy Gamer, Enermax 350watt dual fan power supply. I had hoped for better results though. 3DMARK2001SE seems impressive though as I get 10,150. However!... Things are not shiney silky smooth still...

My problem us that I play all games in 1024x768x32. I find that many games have performance issues when I turn details much higher than Medium. For example, while frame rates remain above 40, UT2003 is too jittery unless I turn off shadows and detail textures and a few other settings down a notch. What I mean is the textures and 3D objects get a bad case of vibra/blurr. I hope you all know what I mean. Another example is Jedi Knight II. With everything maxed out except Texture level is High and not Very High the game runs glossy smooth. Almost makes you dizzy. But I push that texture detail to the Very high setting and I get the Vibrablurr effect when I pan my view left and right. And Lastly Morrowind is generally unaccpetable. Frames run between 20 and 30 outdoors and this give the vibrablurr even more noticably than the other two. There are others but this is the most obvios ones I can describe. I do not want to turn res and details down but cannot afford a 9700 Pro.

Any suggestions??? I can get a good deal on an ASUS G4ti4600-128MB card from a freind or for a little less I can get a G4ti4200-128MB card. will either of these solutions address this? Is video memory my problem? I can only afford one more swap out on this machine. Please advise...

Charles.

[LORD-eX-Bu]

Go into Rivatuner(get it, RC12) and go to the lower customize button, choose the "Customize DirectDraw and Direct3d Settings". Click on the Vsync tab and set it to always off, from there head to "Textures" tab and set the ammount of System memory for PCI textures to 255 Mb. That should help with performance, definately did it for my rig, but I wasn't getting any performance issues before. Could just be your Ti 4200 being only 64 mb definately if you have AA or Aniso on or too high. Make sure you don't have many things running in the background as I guess that might degrade performance, umm... oh yeah, upgrade all your drivers. 41.03 for video card, and upgrade whatever else you have to the latest.:D

[thcdru2k]

if you can't build your own system, and must buy a prebuilt next time check out ocsystems.com

the absolute best in prebuilt high performance overclocked gaming systems. and they are the cheapest thing to building it yourself as you can get.

[StealthHawk]

cvearl,

at the resolution you listed(1024X768), you should not be experiencing performance problems with 64MB of vram. you should be able to play at highest settings in at least JK2 without losing too much speed. generally the performance issues arise when using resolutions like 1280 with full settings and anything above that.

although, your problems might also stem from using 4x FSAA at 1024 in addition to highest settings in game. but you don't mention that, so it probably isn't a problem. do you have anisotropic filtering enabled? that and high quality shadows will kill performance.
head to "Textures" tab and set the ammount of System memory for PCI textures to 255 Mb. That should help with performance, definately did it for my rig, but I wasn't getting any performance issues before.

that shouldn't do anything unless you are using a PCI card, as far as i can tell it's a leftover setting from the Riva 128 and/or other later PCI versions of nvidia cards, where the card used a kind of AGP texturing style mode.

[LORD-eX-Bu]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
that shouldn't do anything unless you are using a PCI card, as far as i can tell it's a leftover setting from the Riva 128 and/or other later PCI versions of nvidia cards, where the card used a kind of AGP texturing style mode.

I used to say the same thing, but setting it to that did in fact improve performance on my rig. Try it, maybe you won't see a big result but you will notice it I bet.;) :D

[cvearl]

Originally posted by thcdru2k
if you can't build your own system, and must buy a prebuilt next time check out ocsystems.com

the absolute best in prebuilt high performance overclocked gaming systems. and they are the cheapest thing to building it yourself as you can get.


I built this system. I always build them. I did not go on Alienwares specs alone. The MSI card was editors choice in it's class everywhere I read. Same with the ASUS P4PE and the Crucial Technologies DDR was as close to Infinion or Cossair as I could afford. Ultimately I know the difference between With and without Vsync on. Often I prefer Vsync. Depends on the game. I'm just really picky about smoothness of frames in high speed action games. Ok, to know what I mean, play JKII in 1024x768 low details on any G4Ti card on a 1GHz or faster processor. Now thats smooth. Same with Half Life. The whole screen and all objects and related textures scroll silky smooth panning your ciew from left to right (aside from some minor tearing due to high frame rates). But I had hoped that I would experience the same
dizzying effect on UT2003, JKII, STV Elite Force or Morrowind at maxed detail levels 1024*768*32 having built this system to these specs. I'm wishing I had a 128MB Video card to compare against. I am wondering if anyone here has made that jump from 64 to 128 on a card roughly the same speed. My only theory is that at max details I am going out across AGP for some of the textures causing less than perfect frame transitions. Sound plausable? Frames per second really mean nothing if the textures are not crystal clear at high resolutions looking left and right.

Charles.

[thcdru2k]

my bad my man..thought you meant you built it off the site.

considering your specs however..i think you should be getting a bit more than 10150.. and yeah at 1024x768 it shouldn't have bad performance. even with some level of aa or af on. tweak tweak and tweak..assuming your using xp, get tweak-xp pro. latest drivers of course..you prolly know that. and just use rivatuner, heck even default settings of nvidia drivers should be enough. check your bios..make sure 4x is enabled..and fastwrites. and enable through any of the videocard tweaking programs.

[cvearl]

FYI - I use 30.82 drivers as I find desktop quality is lower with 40.x drivers. However, with 40.72 or whatever the latest were I was getting 11,211 on 3DMARK2001SE.

Charles.

[thcdru2k]

hmm definately sounds like the 64mb is holding you back..i somewhat notice those exact same probs when using the highest texture details. a 128mb card would make the difference between high and highest details. i'd say take up that good deal on the ti4600.