Low FPS Please Help GF4 Ti4200

[CarlosL]

Hey guys I recently bought a GF4 Ti4200 64mb to get rid of my old GF2 mx and have a nice card for the computer.  But now my fps seems pretty much the same.  First my comp specs.

P4 1.5 gig
512 mb sdram
GF4Ti4200
60 gig hdd
and running windows xp pro

Well I ran AH today with these settings:

1024 x 76x 32 bit, vsync off, anti-aliasing off and my fps at the tower with no action is 75.  Graphics look like poo but hey, high FPS.  So I go to fly and I have just three guys on my screen and terrain, my fps is 30ish.  Now this is really what I did not expect on such a low setting

Now I run the game at 1600 x 1400 x 16 bit, v-sync off and anti-aliasing on 2x.  Even thought these settings look a little high my regular FPS with action on the screen is still 30.  But if I get into a furball it goes down to 7-15 fps (this also happens with other settings)

I have the latest drivers 29.92 and used the refreshrate fix.  Whats going on with my card?  Please help if anyone can, thanks a lot.

[SKurj]

Latest drivers are 30.XX something ... u can give those a try..

I know i tried to help ya in the arena one day, with little success, perhaps someone else can shed some light..


SKurj

[Animal]

Hi

Make sure you enable AGP 4x and Fastwrites in the BIOS
Update to the 30.82 drivers from nvidia's site

You should be getting MUCH higher framerates.

[CarlosL]

Ok I updated and still no luck.... I updated to 30.82

[CarlosL]

I looked through my BIOS and I can't find any of those options you guys keep telling me to find.  Just to make sure my BIOS settings are configured at start up by deleting delete correct?

[Hussein]

Fastwrites actually degrades performance according to benchmarks Animal.

First of all, if your Pentium4 1.5 is coupled with a SDRAM motherboard, you can't expect much performance from it. It's about as fast as 1.1Ghz PIII. That's your first bottleneck.

Second, do you have resident anti-virus software running? Any other software running on background? If you have, disable them. Especially F-prot5 hogs up system resources like crazy.

Third, make sure you UNINSTALL the old displaydriver before you install a new one. If you didn't do this, uninstall your display driver now and then reinstall a new one. Make sure you have DirectX8.1b.

[LePaul]

A P4 with SDRAM?  Ouch

I have 2 AMD Athlon XP 2000 systems.  One uses SDRAM and a Voodoo 5 card.  The SDRAM system, High FPS is 60-70 (in tower)...get into the game, smoke, etc, mean average is 30 to 40.  The other system, with DDR RAM, GeForce 4 4600 (and some mild overclocking) shows 75 fps everywhere..tower, smoke, etc.  Cant seem to go higher due to monitor refresh (60hz)

My thought is your motherboard/ram is your bottleneck.  If 4x AGP is enabled and everything else the guys mentioned is checked, I'd really consider a new motherboard that takes advantage of the CPU.  SDRAM, as I mentioned, is much slower.  You should be able to find some P4 DDR or RAMBUS boards.

Good luck

[bloom25]

Your graphics card is being severely handicapped by using an Intel 845 ( not to be confused with 845D, E, or G, these are much different chipsets) based board.  Is this a "name-brand" computer?

The fact that so many P4 computers were sold with SDRAM as being "fast" nearly borders on fraud IMO.

That system is barely faster than a 1 GHz P3 would have been overall.

You can try newer drivers, DX 8.1b, and shutting down non-essential programs running in the background.  This might gain you a little bit of an increase in FPS.

[sidthekid]

Carlos Have you turned up the default direct 3d settings. When you replave 3d card it resets. Go to Display settings/ Click on advance/ click on gforce card/ then advance/ Click on direct 3d


turn up your pci texture memory size to 64. I went for a 64 mb to 128 mb they stayed same until i set this to 128. double Fps after setting it to 128. Hope this helps

[Toad]

I thought so.

[Animal]

Hussein, can you link me to a few benchmarks proving this Fastwrites decrease in performance?
Not that I dont believe you, I just wanna see the results to get informed.

[fullback]

Smoothness is preferable to high framerates. The best you'll ever realize is the monitor refesh rate. The human eye cannot discern the difference above 25-30 fps, but monitor refresh is discernable below 70 Hz.

At a movie theater, you're watching 24 fps. Not too bad is it?

As long as you have a monitor refresh 70+Hz, I would recommend that you run things at 1024x768 32 bit.

In your bios setup, make sure aperture size is 128MB (double video card memory).

Play with different video settings and be conscious of smoothness and not fixated on framerates.

And have fun!
Fullback

[Eagler]

fwiw

when I went from my GeForce2 Ultra to Geforce4 ti 4400 when I first put it in and the PNY driver, my performance stunk (Win98). Not until I formatted the hard drive, fresh install of OS and other stuff, Dx8.1 and all, did I see the huge difference in cards. I'm sure I did not un-install the Ge2 properly and it was time for the Win98 re-install anyway

At least this time I had the digital photos backed up on CD's

gl

[JimBear]

LOL Eagler,

The last time I did a reformat I forgot to save the Digi Pics, my wife still reminds me about the "lost" vacation shots

[Animal]

I dont wanna start a long arguement over this because its been overdone in many forums.

In the movie teather, 24fps is smooth because of montion blur.
In a monitor screen, playing games, the healthy human eye can notice up to 60fps.

I can very clearly tell the difference between 30fps and 50fps. 30fps is the minimum I like to have, and its not smooth enough for me (call me spoiled)

You wont see a difference above 60 though.

Originally posted by fullback
Smoothness is preferable to high framerates. The best you'll ever realize is the monitor refesh rate. The human eye cannot discern the difference above 25-30 fps, but monitor refresh is discernable below 70 Hz.

At a movie theater, you're watching 24 fps. Not too bad is it?

As long as you have a monitor refresh 70+Hz, I would recommend that you run things at 1024x768 32 bit.

In your bios setup, make sure aperture size is 128MB (double video card memory).

Play with different video settings and be conscious of smoothness and not fixated on framerates.

And have fun!
Fullback