How do i IMPrOVE FRamerates

[Hobodog]

First off in congats to this board being the most technical and well traveled board im with now i need to know an answere to a question asap. What would i do to improve framerates.(specificly FS2K) Like what do i improve on ram, video card, what. OH yeah i think the video card is a 32 bit but im havin figurin out what brand. My comp other vitals are 64mb ram, PIII 500, 25" screen, 80 gb hard disk.(the last two are not neccsary, but im proud of them and no we got the screen with the comp.)

[Sharky]

Hobodog,

First it would greatly help if you could provide more information about your computer.  Specificly things like motherboard, video card, Directx version etc.

However some things to consider.  First the two things that most effect frame rate are your video card and your CPU (over simplfication but good enough for the purposes of this discussion)

Your video card will determine your "fill rate" how fast graphic data can be processed and sent to your display.  Your CPU will determine how fast data can processed and made available to your video card.

So it makes sense that improving the performace of both will significantly improve the framerate performance of your computer.  On the other side of the coin the CPU and video card need to be matched to prevent a "bottleneck".  A bottleneck is created when either the CPU can pass more data than the video card can handle or when the video card can process vastly more data than the CPU can provide it.

So you see it does not do a lot of good to match the latest and greatest Gforce III video card to your PIII 500 as the CPU could'nt come close to filling the capabilities of the video card.  And likewise, matching a AMD 1.3 Gig Thunderbird CPU to a TNT 1 video card is going to swamp the video card with data it can't handle.

As far as your present computer is concerned, the PIII 500 should play Aces High with very acceptable frame rates, if not I suspect that your video card is not up to snuff.  The Gforce II MX is a very good card that would mate well with your CPU and is currently available for well under a hundred dollars.

Sharky



[This message has been edited by Sharky (edited 04-13-2001).]

[Hobodog]

TNT2 is the video card. 256 ram. Latest DirectX i know that i jsut downloaded it. I dont think its tis but the only number i can find 82443BX.

[oboe]

Just FYI, I have a PIII 500 MHz machine, with a Diamond Viper V770 TNT vidcard with 32 MB, and I get frame rates in the 30's an 40's, except when I'm near smoke or a fleet that is under attack, then my FR drops to the low teens.

I have 128 Mb memory - you mentioned you had 64 Mb.  I wonder if that could be the  problem.  Memory is cheap and easy to add.

[TheWobble]

 

IMPrOVE

not typing like a dingdong will pick you up at least 3 fps.

 

[This message has been edited by TheWobble (edited 04-14-2001).]

[MrSiD]

The answer is simple, get a better display card.

Overclock the processor if possible. If not, get a better one (mobo+cpu combo because AMD is the best option atm.)

Doing so, you'll get a guaranteed improvement in framerates. It'll cost a little, but so does everything else in life.

[MrSiD]

Oh and if the question was about Microsoft products, then make sure you have at least 256Mb of ram and a big swapfile.

Increase the size of texturecache if you have less ram. That helped for me with cfs2.

Microsoft games (like their all products) seem to be horribly bloated code and they will eat up every bit of ram and hd you can spare. Only B17II has risen to the level of m$ in that aspect  

[Hobodog]

I got 256 now what do you mean by display card...video card and how do i change swap file and how do i change texture cache(by the wya i just played CFS2 and i got about 5 seconds per frame around the bases that .2FPS

[MrSiD]

cfs2: settings | scenery library | cache size

increasing the cache will slow down startup but after that you should notice less freeze-ups. Helped a lot for me before I upped my ram.

If you get slow framerates in general, buy a geforce2 or 3. The MX model is beginning to be outdated, I see a huge leap in gaming graphics within the next couple months..