games pauses when opening doors on 9600se

[Brandon]

CPU:Sempron 2800+
motherboad :K8V-X
RAM: 512 DDR 400
Video Card: saphiree 9600se
Hard drive: maxtor dimaond max 10 sata 200gb 16 mb cache
sound card: sb live value



When i am playing games like quake 4 and F.E.A.R and i up the graphic
detail a little bit, i notice when i walk around and espically open
doors the game pauses for a second or two and the hard drive light
comes on and it starts seeking. Quake 4 will run good on low settings
640 by 480, but when i put it to medium the problems comes up alot,
espcially when opeing doors. But the werid this is that after i play
the map once and i die, and i load the map up again, its really smooth,
It doesn't pause at all.

I also notice the problem when playing UT2004, however it hard ever
happens. But when it does it will pause and the hard drive light will
come on for about 5 -10 seconds. However once agan the problem happens
when the graphic detail is on high rather than low.


Is this a problem with my video card? or my hard drive (which is brand
new)? or maybe i don't have enough ram? Or could it be that the link
between my south bridge and my north bride is too slow ( V-LINK 533
mb/s)?

Can some one please help me out

Thanks alot

 

[Augustus]

Is this a problem with my video card? or my hard drive (which is brand

new)? or maybe i don't have enough ram? Or could it be that the link
between my south bridge and my north bride is too slow ( V-LINK 533
mb/s)?

Can some one please help me out

Your video card is marginal at best for the types of games you're running. A
9600SE is very slow (325core, 200 memory) and more importantly, only 64bit
memory, a huge bottleneck. Given that a 9800 Pro or 6600GT is cheap and four
times the card of what you've got, I would be looking at that first. The
second thing is that 512Mb of RAM in the system is marginal for gaming with
these titles, which have a very large memory footprint. Win XP the other
resident apps will use up 230-300Mb of memory itself, leaving only 210-280Mb
for your games. They require much more than this, so virtual memory is being
accessed continually slowing down things greatly. That's why the HDD light
is always coming on. Upgrade to 1024Mb ASAP.

 

[The Outsider]

Your video card is marginal at best for the types of games you're running. A
9600SE is very slow (325core, 200 memory) and more importantly, only 64bit
memory, a huge bottleneck. Given that a 9800 Pro or 6600GT is cheap and four
times the card of what you've got, I would be looking at that first. The
second thing is that 512Mb of RAM in the system is marginal for gaming with
these titles, which have a very large memory footprint. Win XP the other
resident apps will use up 230-300Mb of memory itself, leaving only 210-280Mb
for your games. They require much more than this, so virtual memory is being
accessed continually slowing down things greatly. That's why the HDD light
is always coming on. Upgrade to 1024Mb ASAP.

I have 1024mb ram, X800XL, AMD64 3500+ and in Q4 I sometimes get the
slight pauses when the doors open too. No, I'm not upgrading to 2gb of
ram for one game.

 

[J. Clarke]

CPU:Sempron 2800+
motherboad :K8V-X
RAM: 512 DDR 400
Video Card: saphiree 9600se
Hard drive: maxtor dimaond max 10 sata 200gb 16 mb cache
sound card: sb live value



When i am playing games like quake 4 and F.E.A.R and i up the graphic
detail a little bit, i notice when i walk around and espically open
doors the game pauses for a second or two and the hard drive light
comes on and it starts seeking. Quake 4 will run good on low settings
640 by 480, but when i put it to medium the problems comes up alot,
espcially when opeing doors. But the werid this is that after i play
the map once and i die, and i load the map up again, its really smooth,
It doesn't pause at all.

I also notice the problem when playing UT2004, however it hard ever
happens. But when it does it will pause and the hard drive light will
come on for about 5 -10 seconds. However once agan the problem happens
when the graphic detail is on high rather than low.


Is this a problem with my video card? or my hard drive (which is brand
new)? or maybe i don't have enough ram? Or could it be that the link
between my south bridge and my north bride is too slow ( V-LINK 533
mb/s)?

Can some one please help me out

From the symptoms you're describing it sounds like a faster disk (WD Raptor
or if you've got bucks a 15K Cheetah) or a RAID-0 drive array would help.
Before you spend bucks though, if you didn't defrag after installing the
game give it a shot--I don't expect it to accomplish anything but it's
free.

The pause when opening doors is the game loading additional information off
the disk, probably imagery for the new area revealed. This is confirmed by
the disk light coming on at those times.

If it's really smooth the second time through, that would indicate that the
information previously read is still cached in RAM, which in turn would
indicate that you have sufficient RAM.

It doesn't appear to be a video-board issue at all.

If you really want to nail it down, you might want to try setting up some
counters--go to control panel/administrative tools/performance and set up a
counter log recording what information you think might be relevant--at a
minimum "%processor time", "committed bytes", and "%disk read time", set to
sample data every second, set your watch, including the seconds, to system
time, play your game (note that there may be a performance penalty from the
logging), when the pause you note occurs note the time, quit, pull up the
logs and see what you see. Something will have peaked where the pause
occurred--processor time, committed bytes (if it's more than the amount of
physical memory then paging occurred), or disk read time, and which of
those it is will tell you where the problem lies. If all of those are well
below the maximum, _then_ look at video.

By the way, there are some books you might want to take a look at--there's
an introduction to performance monitoring in the Windows 2003 Server
Administrator's Pocket Consultant, and there are a number of more detailed
books out on Windows performance tuning. None is outstanding that I've
encountered but any will get you started--I notice that Amazon has a number
of titles used for 2-3 bucks--search on "windows 2000 performance".

Be careful by the way with online performance guides--some of them are
written by people who don't really know the system.

 

[Brandon]

Thanks for the inslight, i was making the problem before with my 80gb
samsung EIDE hard drive, and i though buying the maxtor SATA would
solve it.

But i had i good feeling that it was a bottle neck in my video card or
in the amount of memory i have.

I will run the preformance logs and let you guys know wat it says.

Thanks alot for the insight

 

[Brandon]

Thanks for the inslight, i was making the problem before with my 80gb
samsung EIDE hard drive, and i though buying the maxtor SATA would
solve it.

But i had i good feeling that it was a bottle neck in my video card or
in the amount of memory i have.

I will run the preformance logs and let you guys know wat it says.

Thanks alot

 

[Brandon]

I found that when i run FEAR the problems happens ALOT. More than any
other game, even Quake 4. I ran the counters and in FEAR "disk read
time" is almost always above 80%, it even hits a 100% a few times ( a
few times to many if you ask me) I also notice that when ever the "disk
read time" goes up to 100% the "processor time" goes WAY down,
sometimes even to 0% . However when play quake 4 "disk read time" only
goes over 70 - 100% when i open the doors somtimes, but i notice the
same thing in the graphs that when the "disk read time" goes up high
the processor times comes down way low.

What does this mean?

 

[Pogma]

Brandonwrote:
I found that when i run FEAR the problems happens ALOT. More than
any

?

Fear is incredibly demanding both with ram and GPU, IOW, I gig is
required and nothing slower than a 6600GT/X800.

IMO, the minium specs for a FEAR/Q4 box are AMD 3000, 1 gig and
ideally a 6800GS/X800GTO....I realise you have AGP, but I'm just
mentioning this for other people's benefit as well.

 

[Brandon]

I understand that quake 4 and FEAR need really good hardware, but what
about UT2004, and i just got Need for Speed most Wanted and the
problems happens as well. i think it might be because i have everything
on high excpet for AA. But the game isn't choppy its really smooth, but
once in a while it pauses.

I am pretty sure its because my lack of ram and 64 bit memory interface
on my video card

What do you guys think?