Billy said:
I am trying to upgrade the system for CoV for my son. I have upped the
Ram to 1gig and installed an nvidia mx4000 128mb vid card. the game is
running but with severe lag. my system which is older and slower is
running the same ram and video but no lag. is there a problem with the
ATI chipset accepting the nvidia card? pc wizard is showing that the
emachine is benchmarking way above my compaq. any ideas on how to get
the lag out of the game? BTW, all setting on the game are on the min
and still lagging.
If you benchmark the two machines with 3DMark, how do they compare ?
There are many different versions, but I'd suggestion 3DMark2001SE build330.
At least some of the latest versions here, probably won't run at all
on that card. I use the older versions for my collection of machines
here.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads4.html
The mirror sites for the download are listed here:
http://www.futuremark.com/download/3dmark2001/
Run the benchmark once 3DMark2001 is installed, and compare the
two machines (assuming they are reasonably close to one another
hardware wise).
Another tool you can use, is Powerstrip from entechtaiwan.com . I use
the popup menu from the task bar, and there is a status window that opens.
It can show whether your AGP is set up OK or not.
You want your "transfer mode" to be either DMA or DIME. You
basically don't want it to be "disabled".
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpfix/powerstrip2.gif
If Powerstrip shows a problem, then you need to work on your
drivers. The motherboard needs chipset drivers (and those
may have been provided by the OS install CD, or you can download
some). You also need to try different versions of video card drivers.
Nvidia has archives, which you can find reference to via their search
engine. You also need the latest version of DirectX, for modern games.
(I originally found the archives via a search...)
http://www.nvidia.com/page/search.html?page=1&keywords=archive&booleanMode=1
(but this one doesn't show up any more that way, and could well be the one
you'd want.)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html
HTH,
Paul