Do I need to upgrade?

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johnny8977

Hi all. Today I bought GTA Vice City and Morrowind for the PC. However, I'm
having some performance issues on both. The frame rates drops to an
unmanagable level whenever I have either character run during the game. I've
tried changing the draw distance and resolution on both with minimal
success.

I've running XP on a [email protected], 512 RAM and Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb with the
latest drivers. My best resolution is 1024x768 cos I have a TFT screen thats
maximum is 1024....I have 57GB free of a 120GB HDD

I've had no performance issues on any other games at all. With resoluton at
1024x768 i can run everything I have on pretty much max settings (Unreal 2,
SOF2, Jedi Kight, C&C Generals.....all relatively new stuff).

It just seems weird these two games seem to much. Is there something wrong
or should I be looking at a new GPU?

Thanks as always for any opinions.
 
Well, it isn't in need of upgrading, I was running vice city with a ti4200
and an XP2000 (1.66ghz) fine.....

Could be a driver conflict but your system is more than capable.....
 
OOC what is your aperture set to in the bios...also your DX and GL settings in display properties set as? quality / performance
custom?
 
I agree with another responder... Look into your drivers. Might wanna
install an older version of the Detonators. Also, make sure you defrag as
well. I ran GTA Vice City on a Duron 950/512MB PC100/GF3 Ti200 (o/c to
250/500) smooth as silk. I was using v41.09 Det's, along with DX9a, if it
helps.

-
johnny8977 stood up at show-n-tell, in [email protected],
and said:
 
Hi,

I run morrowind on a 2.5GHz 1GB of memory and geforce 4 in 1280x960 mode
everything set to maximum and still everything is very smooth.

Your setup is more than capable of running morrowind.

So, somewhere there must be something wrong with your system (any other
processes running in the background? (did you also check for virusses
lately)).

Regards, Ron AF Greve.
 
johnny8977 said:
Hi all. Today I bought GTA Vice City and Morrowind for the PC. However,
I'm having some performance issues on both. The frame rates drops to an
unmanagable level whenever I have either character run during the game.
I've tried changing the draw distance and resolution on both with minimal
success.

I've running XP on a [email protected], 512 RAM and Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb with
the latest drivers.
Click to expand...

Sometimes the "latest" NV drivers aren't the best for certain games. The
system is more than enough to play these. Do you have a bunch of AV
software ect running in the background? Or maybe a virus? It's something
with the setup not the hardware that's causing this.
 
1. download and install the nv refresh fix, don't remember where I found it
but it is widely available
set your refresh rates for your desired rate for every resolution you
may play in.

2. Disable V sync in your drivers or use gforce tweak utility to do it for
you.

3. find out how to cap refresh rates in the games you play, cap them to
match your refresh rate you selected earlier.

If there is to much of a difference between the refresh rate and fps you
will see "tearing", to avoid this they used the sync every frame or vsync
setting to match the two up but this really slows the system down. The work
around is to disable vsync, select a reasonable refresh rate (I use 85),
then cap your fps to that level.

XP will automatically set the refresh rate to 60 unless you install the
nvrefresh tool.

gforce tweak util is available at www.guru3d.com along with the nvrefresh
file
 
Well, it isn't in need of upgrading, I was running vice city with a ti4200
and an XP2000 (1.66ghz) fine.....

Could be a driver conflict but your system is more than capable.....
Click to expand...

Me too with a ti4200 (overclocked) on a 1Ghz P3 with 512Mb CAS2. I
keep feeling the urge to upgrade but my PC seems more capable then a
few of my friends PCs that are supposed to be more powerfull. I must
just have been lucky picking the parts?
 
Moonlit said:
Hi,

I run morrowind on a 2.5GHz 1GB of memory and geforce 4 in 1280x960 mode
everything set to maximum and still everything is very smooth.

Your setup is more than capable of running morrowind.
Click to expand...

It runs ok on a 1.2gig athlon with 256Meg of memory here.
can't set everything to max though ;-)

jim.
 
JAD said:
OOC what is your aperture set to in the bios...also your DX and GL
settings in display properties set as? quality / performance custom?
Click to expand...

What should the aperture be set to anyway? Equal to your video card's mem?
Lower? Higher?
 
Hi all. Today I bought GTA Vice City and Morrowind for the PC. However, I'm
having some performance issues on both. The frame rates drops to an
unmanagable level whenever I have either character run during the game. I've
tried changing the draw distance and resolution on both with minimal
success.
Click to expand...

Well Morrowind is a bloated pig, there's no doubt about that. You may
need to do some careful CFG editing to cut some detail down.
 
Dirtyred said:
What should the aperture be set to anyway? Equal to your video card's mem?
Lower? Higher?
Click to expand...
64mb for some reason, god knows why but any higher isn't recommended?
 
My son had the same problem with GTA VC got to their Web site and download a
patch

Dale
 
Well Morrowind is a bloated pig, there's no doubt about that. You may
need to do some careful CFG editing to cut some detail down.
Click to expand...

"bloated pig" Nonsens! Have you any idea of what Morrowind does or
what is involved in creating an open free 3Dworld like that?

Besides, MW runs very well on 700MHz PIII/Athlon, 900MHz Duron, 1GHz
Celeron and GF3 Ti, ATI9000. It even runs tolerably on a lot of lesser
videocards like Matrox G400-G550, ATI8500, GF MX, though it won't be
as pretty and will need some tinkering with distance&resolution.

One thing: - What does he mean by unmanageble during pchar running?
Is his expectations unreasonable?
Could he be talking about interference from terrainloading/generation?
That is normal and cannot be avoided by any PC-performance available
in foreseeable future.
In Morrowind, that can be alleviated by turning off threadloading (MW
will then pause/freeze instead and more seldom) and having lots of
ram.

GTA, I don't know. I don't play such male testosteron games.


ancra
 
I just went through a weird experience with aperture set at 256 it jacked everything up I used to use that equation also- 64 meg
memory 64 megs on the aperture,,,, however 128 works great on a 64 meg card.... with that experience that what I use now.... 128
for everything.... don't have a 256 card as of yet,,
 
Ancra said:
"bloated pig" Nonsens! Have you any idea of what Morrowind does or
what is involved in creating an open free 3Dworld like that?

Besides, MW runs very well on 700MHz PIII/Athlon, 900MHz Duron, 1GHz
Celeron and GF3 Ti, ATI9000. It even runs tolerably on a lot of lesser
videocards like Matrox G400-G550, ATI8500, GF MX, though it won't be
as pretty and will need some tinkering with distance&resolution.

One thing: - What does he mean by unmanageble during pchar running?
Is his expectations unreasonable?
Could he be talking about interference from terrainloading/generation?
That is normal and cannot be avoided by any PC-performance available
in foreseeable future.
In Morrowind, that can be alleviated by turning off threadloading (MW
will then pause/freeze instead and more seldom) and having lots of
ram.

GTA, I don't know. I don't play such male testosteron games.


ancra
Click to expand...

Morrowind does not run well on my AthlonXP200+, 512MB pc2100, Radeon9700pro,
via KT266A mobo. Indoors it's okayish, outdoors the framerate's quite low.
You have to tone down a lot of settings to be able to look around jerk-free.
I've been reading the other pc.games newsgroup when the game came out, and a
lot of gamers had performance issue's with it as well.
 
JAD said:
I just went through a weird experience with aperture set at 256 it
jacked everything up I used to use that equation also- 64 meg
memory 64 megs on the aperture,,,, however 128 works great on a 64
meg card.... with that experience that what I use now.... 128 for
everything.... don't have a 256 card as of yet,,
Click to expand...

K. I have a 256 card and I have the aperature set at 128. Maybe I'll try
bumping it up.
 
Dirtyred said:
K. I have a 256 card and I have the aperature set at 128. Maybe I'll try
bumping it up.
Click to expand...

Actually...i would bump it down to 64. I have a 64 med card, aperature set
to 128. Thus if you have more onboard memory you should reduce the aperature
size and give yourself more system ram.
 
Hi all. Today I bought GTA Vice City and Morrowind for the PC. However, I'm
having some performance issues on both. The frame rates drops to an
unmanagable level whenever I have either character run during the game. I've
tried changing the draw distance and resolution on both with minimal
success.

I've running XP on a [email protected], 512 RAM and Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb with the
latest drivers. My best resolution is 1024x768 cos I have a TFT screen thats
maximum is 1024....I have 57GB free of a 120GB HDD

I've had no performance issues on any other games at all. With resoluton at
1024x768 i can run everything I have on pretty much max settings (Unreal 2,
SOF2, Jedi Kight, C&C Generals.....all relatively new stuff).

It just seems weird these two games seem to much. Is there something wrong
or should I be looking at a new GPU?

Thanks as always for any opinions.
Click to expand...

Do you have a real soundcard ?
I have seen games that have lots of positional sound effects
bring some systems with total software sound to there knees.

Also background apps could be killing you.

:-) Greg B.
 
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