I've upgraded...and now it's slower??????

[The Lost Jedi]

Okay, here's the story:

While playing KOTOR 2 last weekend on my new PC, my graphics card,

a GeForce 4800 FX model, decides it's finally had enough (it is over a year old) and dies.

I get a new card put in, a GeForce 5200 FX with 128MB, plus some more RAM, giving me a total of over 1G in RAM. Love it!

However, when I play KOTOR 2, or any of my games now, I notice that there is a slight 'lagging' in gameplay. I always play on a 1024X768 setting, which is best for my computer, but now in order to get anywhere near what it was playing like, I have to play at 800 X 600 <_< which - in absolute truth - SUCKS!

 

I have checked all settings and tweaked what I can, but to no avail.

 

Any ideas, or any explanations as to why this stupid things gotten SLOWER instead of FASTER?????

[Judge Hades]

Someone should have told you that the GeForce 5200 is worthless regardless of RAM. Overall clock speed the 4800 is faster and more efficient.

[The Lost Jedi]

:angry: Oh for the love of....

 

Grrr! Alright so what's the next best thing to put into my machine. That won't require I rob a bank or something? "

[Judge Hades]

Well, I got a 5700 LE with 256 MB and there was a moderate boost to gameplay speed. In any case in KotOR 2 you do need to do a lot of tweaking to get it run decently. If you do not have the money for the 5700 LE get the program called FRAPS. It is a program that will give you the frames per second for nearly any computer game. You can use that tool to tweak the settings to get the best possible performance balanced with graphical quality. Also sometimes the game will drop in frame rate for no reason. When that happens mess with the settings for a moment then go back to your normal settings. That does help against performance hiccups.

 

As for getting a better NVidia card here is a link to Tigerdirect.com. This is a list of all the NVidia card they have. Just stay away from the cards that are in the low end of each generation for they are often worse than the high end of the generation previous.

 

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/ca...&Sort=0&Recs=10

[Pa3PyX]

It is rumored that Geforce 5 (FX) series boards have some design flaws that prevent them from properly supporting certain features in hardware (such as pixel shaders). The nVidia driver has to implement parts of these functions in software to work around these flaws. So some of these cards may be slower than Geforce 4 when using certain features. If you want nVidia, you should probably go with Geforce 6.

[Darth Tratious]

i have a 256 mb geforce NVIDIA Geforce FX 5200 256MB and some things don't work right especially when i tweak the settings it slows down but that might be my ram when Compaq/Hp built my computer they were suppossed to put pc2700 in but put pc3200U and when i bought more memory my computer ran way to slow so thats maybe why i get lag :'(

[Kiwegapa]

The 5700 and 5900 are okay, but the 5200 and 5800 are best avoided. I would recommend a GeForce 6600 GT with AGP interface. You can get one of those for just under $200 US.

 

If you prefer an ATI solution, a Radeon 9800 might be your best bet. Currently ATI's newer cards are either PCI Express (needs new motherboard) or very expensive (X800 series, which I have).

 

Sorry you got no/bad advice. The Geforce 5200 and 5800 perform worse than the 4x00 Ti cards pretty much across the board. By the time nVidia introduced the 5700 and 5900 and then the 6x00 series, they'd cleaned up their act.

 

And of course, KOTOR performs best on nVidia.

[Heyallo]

FX 5200 aint worthless

 

PC Specs:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.5ghz)

512mb DDR ram

Dual 20gb HDD

CD-R Drive

GeFORCE FX 5200 128mb

 

And The Game Runs PERFECTLY for me, no lag no nothin and thats at 1024x768 wit everythin on max lol

[adrich81]

Bad luck - the 4800 is so much better than the 5200. The FX line was never great - the 5200, 5500, 5600 and 5800 really didn't deliver what they promised. For example the 5200, 5500 and 5600 boast pixel shader 2.0 support but physically can't deliver the perfomance needed to run it. The 5700 (non le) and 5900 are good cards though and the 6 series rocks...

[Master Dahvernas]

It is rumored that Geforce 5 (FX) series boards have some design flaws that prevent them from properly supporting certain features in hardware (such as pixel shaders). The nVidia driver has to implement parts of these functions in software to work around these flaws. So some of these cards may be slower than Geforce 4 when using certain features. If you want nVidia, you should probably go with Geforce 6.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

This is fact.

 

Pixel Shader 2.0 specs require a minimum of 24 point floating percision.

 

Nvidia cards are designed with only 16 and 32 while ATI has 16, 24 and 32. Most developers use 24 percision and since Nvidia just does not have that... They are forced to use the 32 percision floaters which of course slows down the rendering because it is actually being "upsampled" and then "downsampled" again -- versus ATI that just goes from 24 to the GPU and is rendered -- And this is the FX series main flaw.

 

What is so interesting from a hardware guru's perspective is that the whole reason the FX line sucks is that Nvidia became arrogant and thought they didn't need to work with MS when DX9 was being developed (summer 2002) and thought they'd develop a card on their own that would run DX9 shaders and things just as well (if not better) than ATI... But in the end, ATI beat them because they did work with MS and knew about the 24 point path and designed their chips to incorporate that vs. Nvidia who didn't.