Komputah Kweschunz

[Tigranes]

Current System:

Mobo - Abit N7F-S Socket A Motherboard, nvidia chipset (nforce 2 ultra), AGP

CPU - AMD Athlon XP 2600+, Barton Core clocked at 1918mhz, FSB 166, Bus Speed 333

Vidcard - ATI Radeon 9600 Pro AGP 256mb

Memory - 2x512 Hynix, 1x512 Corsair = 1.5gb, PC3200, 200mhz frequency

 

Problem:

Sub-30, or even sub-20 ping on most games from this year or even last year, cant even think about shaders/shadows, HDR, water, dynamic lights or AA. I don't think RAM is the bottleneck here, I just increased from 1gb to 1.5gb and it has no difference in loading, fps, whatever. I just alt-tab a bit better.

 

NWN2 is especially an issue; I turn shadows off, point light off, water off, 2 lights per object, and I get 15-20fps in outdoors (which I find acceptable), but 5-10 indoors, and if there are a lot of lights (i.e. just a portal, or the Keep main room with the chandeliers) then it becomes catastrophic. Like, 3-4fps. Texture settings and others don't seem to matter at all. I'm pretty sure it's the shadows and dynamic lighting that hurt me, and I want to be able to play NWN2 at +15fps as I plan to use the toolset and testing my creations will be a beach at those fps.

 

I am thinking of getting the Nvidia Geforce 6800GT 256mb. It benchmarks at 30fps in Half-Life 2 AA4/AF8 1600x1200, and I only play in 1024x768 (and dont play shooters so dont need higher than 30).

 

Questions:

-> Is there another card that I could be getting thats better value? I want to spend as little money as possible.

-> I am looking at one in new zealand's equivalent of ebay, which is a year old. I plan to use this card for 1-2 more years. How much does it matter that it's already a year old?

-> Will the CPU become a bottleneck and prevent me from enjoying the card?

[Pidesco]

If you don't want to spend money then that seems to be a good card. Just don't forget to get an AGP card.

 

Also, the CPU almost never is the bottleneck.

[angshuman]

- If you can get an AGP 6800GT for about $100 - $120 (do the conversion yourself ), it's probably a good buy. A brand new 7600GS AGP can be had in the US for about $120 these days (which is robbery since the PCIe version is about $88), and the 6800GT should be a fair bit faster than this card.

 

- Very hard to say. These things are really fragile, they could break in 1 month or last for years. Try to get a card that has never been overclocked or had its heatsink tampered with.

 

- Yes, I wouldn't say it's unlikely. A 6800GT is a little bit of an overkill for an XP2600+.

[taks]

NWN2 in particular seems to load the CPU heavily. that thought based on the fact that textures don't make much of a difference. i'm using a 128 MB 6800 with all 16 pipes turned on with a 3200+ and only 1 GB of RAM (asus a8v mobo, or something like that) and i'm doing quite well (triple what you are getting, tigranes) except during large spell battles. i'd imagine turning down lights to 1 or 2 would improve my performance.

 

i'm guessing, btw, that shadows and lights are using a lot of CPU time for setup. i don't really care about either too much, so out they went. there are very few places where water is a key factor in the visuals so out it went, too.

 

taks

[mkreku]

ATI are releasing an AGP version of their X1950Pro video card. But I suspect that it would be a definite overkill for your Athlon XP 2600+. It's a nice, fast card otherwise.

[kirottu]

- If you can get an AGP 6800GT for about $100 - $120 (do the conversion yourself ), it's probably a good buy. A brand new 7600GS AGP can be had in the US for about $120 these days (which is robbery since the PCIe version is about $88), and the 6800GT should be a fair bit faster than this card.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

6800GT is faster than 7600GS?

 

I

Edited November 16, 2006 by kirottu

[Wistrik]

I currently have a 6800GT PCIE, and I don't recommend it for playing NWN2.

 

It's playable at 1024x768 with high quality textures, linear/anisotropic filtering, Low shadows (character drop only), bloom, and normal mapping. No water effects, no point shadows, no environment shadows, and no hi-res. (I expect to be able to play at my monitor's native resolution, but the game is only good for screenshots at that setting.)

 

I'm going to be upgrading to the new 8800GTX soon. (all new core hardware in fact)

[angshuman]

6800GT is faster than 7600GS?

By a comfortable margin. Not so much in shader power as in memory bandwidth: the *800 cards have 256-bit memory buses while the *600 ones have 128-bit buses. This has a huge impact on anti-aliasing performance and high-res textures.

[Tigranes]

RIght now there is a bid for a 6800GT AGP at $66 minimum, and $122 to "buy straight away", which I am seriously considering if anyone else bids for it. I thought it would be a good buy for 1-2 years.

 

And I thought the CPU would be the next bottleneck, but I dont plan on replacing that for 1-2 years, when I'd trash & just rebuild, with PCI and all those new-fangled shinies. I just want to play things like NWN2, Gothic 3, MTW2 and Spore at 15+FPS. Not too ambitious, I think.

 

It's playable at 1024x768 with high quality textures, linear/anisotropic filtering, Low shadows (character drop only), bloom, and normal mapping. No water effects, no point shadows, no environment shadows, and no hi-res. (I expect to be able to play at my monitor's native resolution, but the game is only good for screenshots at that setting.)

 

By "playable", what fps do you mean? I am happy if I get a consistent 15+ indoors, because at 15 I myself dont mind, because there's no cursor lag, response lag (not really) and it generally doesnt feel too bad in an rpg. And I would be very happy with those settings. At any less, I cant even click on containers or characters while my character is moving, and if theres a large battle INDOORS, what is a 20 minute battle takes me an hour.

 

Could you post your exact build and the fps you get with those settings? Would be much appreciated.

[Wistrik]

I get about 20 FPS indoors and outdoors so long as I keep the camera over and behind the party (30FPS if I look straight down while outside). If I'm indoors and bring the camera down to a horizontal level behind the party, the FPS can drop as low as 8, which is ugly. Maybe Obsidian should look into BSP trees or something.

 

Here are my current specs. Feel free to laugh.

 

CPU: Athlon64 3200+ (2 Ghz average clock speed)

Mobo: NVidia Nforce4 SLI

Memory: 1 Gb PC3200 DRAM

Memory Bus: 200Mhz

HyperTransfer1 Bus: 1Ghz

Video: 1 NVidia GeForce 6800GT PCIE

Sound: onboard Soundblaster 24-bit (this has worked suprisingly well)

Drives: 2 250Gb SATA hard drives configured RAID 0, DVD R/W

Net: 1 NetGear card (onboard net locks up so I disabled it)

 

Spell battles, and battles in general, don't affect this system much. Rendering the map/graphics hurts more than anything. High resolutions, shadows, and water are FPS killers on this system.

 

I'll be upgrading most of the core hardware when I move up to the GeForce 8800GTX, in particular the power supply which must have two video power outputs capable of sourcing 12V at 30A when connecting to the 8800GTX.

Edited November 17, 2006 by Wistrik

[Tigranes]

Actually, apart from the mobo and sound, that's pretty much exactly the same, except for the video card.

 

Perhaps that means myself upgrading to 6800GT wouldn't do much, implying that the CPU is a bigger bottleneck than I had thought?

 

Wistrik, how different are your indoor and outdoor FPS? If you have a fairly isometric view indoors, is it over 15? Do the presence of torches and otherl ights affect it significantly?

 

You use low shadows, would using none improve your performance significantly?

 

From your post it seems like there isnt so much difference between 6800GT and radeon 9600 Pro. Odd, since 6800GT is supposed to be pretty damn good in comparison. CPU? :crazy:

Edited November 17, 2006 by Tigranes

[Wistrik]

Well, I'm guessing that this game's code is not very well optimized. They probably turned on compiler optimization and let 'er rip. That's not good enough if you want to be competitive. It would explain the heavy dependence on CPU speed, because unoptimized code is going to hit hard in that area. Once you get the data to the GPU, the video card can do its thing just fine, but if your code sucks, your GPU is going to spend a lot of time waiting.

 

Uh, I posted what I have and what I get for FPS ranges...

 

It could be that torches affect me. All I know is if an area is heavy with objects, including creatures, the FPS drops like a rock. If I swivel the view around to a less cluttered area, the FPS shoots back up to around 20. I could make it higher if I turned off shadows completely and did a few other things, but then the game starts looking really ugly. So I sacrifice performance a bit in order to have an enjoyable view.

Edited November 17, 2006 by Wistrik

[taks]

there's gotta be something else going on that's impeding performance with some players. wistrik, your system is about the same as mine and i rarely dip below 20 fps indoors, even zoomed all the way out. nearly 60 outdoors sometimes, though usually in the 40+ range.

 

the only real difference is that i have an IDE drive (7200 rpm WD) and a vanilla 6800 AGP with all the pipes turned on. i do have a better soundcard, however, the audigy 2. maybe that's the killer? older SB cards had serious issues and full HW acceleration actually slowed down the system. that was normally related to an issue with the southbridge, which does not exist in the same manner on an HT enabled system... hmmm.

 

taks

[Wistrik]

Actually zooming out helps performance. Zooming in hurts it because levels of detail (LOD) increase when you do that. Besides, with the walls and taller objects getting in the way all the time, I usually play zoomed out quite a ways.

 

Forgot to add that my FPS can go up to 30+ on occasion, but only outdoors.

Edited November 17, 2006 by Wistrik

[Tigranes]

I get about 20 FPS indoors and outdoor

 

Sorry Wistrik, I didnt read "indoors" in there.

 

I could make it higher if I turned off shadows completely and did a few other things, but then the game starts looking really ugly. So I sacrifice performance a bit in order to have an enjoyable view

 

I'm used to having no shadows, and even without that your settings are a bit higher than what I hve now. If I could get 20 indoors and shooting down with lots of objects I would actually be happy - but it's not quite the performance jump I would expect from such an upgrade.

 

I have a SATA hard drive, by the way, but it's only 160gb and nearly full.

[Wistrik]

I was going to get an incremental upgrade (GeForce79xx video card, faster CPU same socket type) but decided I would be better off spending some extra cash and getting a major core upgrade. Of course it all depends on what a person can afford, but I've been saving my pennies.

Edited November 17, 2006 by Wistrik

[Tigranes]

Yeah. I wouldn't even consider a card upgrade if I didnt see it for such a cheap price. ~$80US is like.. 4-5 hours of part time work, so why not? I won't make a new rig for a while.

[Tigranes]

This is apparently what the card in question used to be, a year ago.

 

http://www.cstuff.co.nz/product.pasp?categ...3&productid=117

[kirottu]

I can

[Xard]

Maybe this site could be helpful?

[Hurlshort]

Hmm, I'm looking at video cards as well. I currently have:

 

P4 2.8 ghz

1 gig RAM

ATI 9600 series 256 mb. card (it was about $180 3 years ago, can't think of the model number)

 

I need an AGP card and I'd prefer ATI, although I'll go with Nvidia if I need it. I'm looking for something in the $200 range. I don't plan on upgrading my mobo or chipset for a couple years.

 

edit: Got a question on http://www.gpureview.com/Radeon-X1950-Pro-AGP-card-471.html,

 

What's the big difference between a 256 mb and 512 mb model?

Edited November 17, 2006 by Hurlshot

[angshuman]

What's the big difference between a 256 mb and 512 mb model?

The clock speeds and memory types (GDDR3) look the same, so I guess there's no catch with the 512, it's just twice the memory, and is probably going to be more expensive. Powercolor does seem to have a mildly overclocked 256 version, though I'd take the 512 over a 10MHz overclock in a heartbeat.

[Wistrik]

Video memory makes a big difference if you're running hi-res with quality textures. For example, if you want to run the Cinematic Mod (hi-res textures) in HalfLife 2, you're going to need a card with lots of memory because the textures are huge.

[angshuman]

Video memory makes a big difference if you're running hi-res with quality textures. For example, if you want to run the Cinematic Mod (hi-res textures) in HalfLife 2, you're going to need a card with lots of memory because the textures are huge.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Agreed, but video memory should be considered only when you're comparing two cards with exactly the same GPU and memory bandwidth. A 7900GT with 256MB is way better than a 7900GS with 512MB.

Edited November 17, 2006 by angshuman

[Hurlshort]

Geez, they really make video card specs confusing. Thanks for all the information, I'm going to try and hunt for either the ATi x1950 Pro or the x1600 Pro.