That RS690 sounds interesting --- 9800 level graphics built in?
Wow. Not bad. Supposedly itll come out anytime now but knowing ATI
who knows when itll come out. Unless It has and Im clueless.
It sounds promising then but I'd still be weary of using it
unless it had a dedicated frame buffer. It's a bit funny
that years ago everyone saw integrated video as bad then it
got even worse by moving towards using main system memory
for the frame buffer and now finally when they're getting
the process sizes down to where they could integrate an IGP
that could play games at *most common* resolutions, it'll
once again be limited by the memory. I like downsized mATX
boards if/when the onboard features would be used (though I
seldom do use them, just have plenty of spare (sound cards
for example) that might as well be used) but for the video
it would seem allocating a few dozen mm³ for 64MB of memory
would be worthwhile, especially with memory prices so low.
Of course by the time its out in qty who knows what the min power to
play games will be at around Xmas time.
True, though I'm not so picky about this anymore... decided
to play some Farcry the other day on a system that had an
o'c FX5700 Personal Cinema card in it, it played fairly well
at 1280x1024 so long as the lighting quality as set to low
and most of the rest of the settings at medium and only
2+Quini FSAA/AF. Not bad at all considering the card only
cost $45 but it's a pity nVidia didn't continue developing
their video capture software so I use WinPVR with it.
Ive been playing DOOM3 more to test the 9600XT level + AMD 3200 combo.
At res higher than 800x600 it looks really fine min jaggies. And
though there is a very slight laggy feel to it all around its
acceptable. The big problem is the few times when multiple
effects/monsters come on the scene. Thats when it seems to freeze like
its loading something while your in mid action.
Im not sure why that is. Do you need a 256 card vs a 128 card?
No, at one point shortly after Doom3 was released I had a
couple of GF4TI4200 cards that I benchmarked. One had 64MB
memory, the other 128. At stock speed the 128MB card was
about 15% faster in the more complex levels but it didn't
o'c very well at all, barely went above 4200 stock for the
memory while the 64MB version o'c to about 4600 speeds so it
was then faster at some levels but about 5% slower at the
rest. 128MB is definitely enough till you crank up the
eyecandy. That is, based on the differences between these
two- with GF4TI, the GPU itself struggled at 1024x768 at
moderate settings on complex levels, was too choppy to play
those levels till resolution was backed down to 800x600.
Unfortunately I can't recall if FSAA and AF were enabled or
not. Probably not though or if so, no more than 2X ea.
Do you need more than 512 megs on your system?
I don't recall the exact figure but it seems like the peak
memory usage on a Win2K system (via Task Manager) running
one of the GF4 was just under 400MB. I don't recall exactly
what was running in the (OS) background though, probably
about 80MB worth, IOW add 40MB or so for XP, less if
services are kept under tight reign. However, it might
speed up level reloading a lot to have more memory for a
filecache.
Is it some tweak? And why does it seem to be loading like it can hold
all the data in memory? or is it some sort of data throughput
bottleneck ?
When it freezes, is there any HDD activity? Do you have any
hardware monitoring software or bios settings checking for
CPU temp (shutdown) or fan speeds, anything like that which
might check at regular (n) second intervals? I should first
ask how long each incident lasts and if there were a regular
interval to it... even if only in complex scenes, perhaps
THEN at a regular interval?
I could even ignore ATI's driver either, even if you tried
other versions, it seems their policy towards drivers is
that whatever they had at the time the card was a current
generation, not much more work gets done on the driver after
that point, you may be left hanging being told "buy our next
card" even if all that was wrong was a driver bug. I don't
know for certain of any such issues with their drivers and
Doom3 though but I'd never checked, IIRC.
You might see if changing some parameters in your game
config file helps. There are some examples on the following
link but it's been so long since I tried them that I have no
particular recollection about them, only that they exist and
may help some on less endowed cards.
http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/FPSConfigs.htm