My battle with frame rate and performance has ended in
apparent success..
Started with p4 1.7
winxp
gf2 mx
512 ram sdram(<--bad RAM, but im stuck)
Frame rate varied at high res from 20-40 in usual situations.
In heavy activity, however, it became unplayable.
Cloud cover and smoke crippled my performance and frame rate.
I upgraded to 768 meg ram and performance improved a little bit.
id say 5fps overall, but still very bad during smoke clouds and
havey action.
Upgraded to a gf4 440 mx. Nice improvement over the gf2 mx.
priolly got me 10-15fps more, overall, clouds were now no
big deal, smoke was ok, so lang as the action was light,
Fleets and heavy activitity, such as exploding aircraft would still
cripple my sht.
Upgraded to gf4 ti 4200..big help. Now I can hang w the
big boys. Still, slide show under some circumstances, such as
exploding buff with millions of tracers would ruin my
attacks on bufff forms. Stil, seeing my FPS at 40-60 regular.
Got ahold of black vipers winxp config thing and disabled a
bunch of bulls hit that was running in the back ground.
Great help, that pushed me solidly 50-70FPS most of the
time, and 20-30 in most harsh conditions.
Went from 1280x1024 32 to 1280x1024 16.
Seemed to help a little bit.
Got rid of dial up and went cable, proly the biggest help of all.
After a cupple of weks, my system started to gel. It seemed
to be firing on all cylinders. I have seen my FPS at 155 (that
is not common, but it makes me feel sexy, somehow).
A busy fleet battle with multible exploding aircraft and
zillions of tracers is the only thing that bogs me down now,
and just for a second. I am quite happy with my system,
now, and feel I should share my lessons learned...
1. Save up your money and get the best card that
a. you can afford
b. your system supports
Stay away from the gf mx things, they just dont cut the
mustard.
c. watch out for the 'latest detonator driver' hype.
I ran with 40.xx's for a while and accidentally rolled
back to 30.82's. noticed a hell of an improvemnet with the
30.82's and now im sticking to them until AH techies
advise differently.
2. Trim the unnecessry bs out of your processes running in
the background. This allows your cpu to focus on AH.
3. If you can afford it, get a high speed internet connect.
This was the most game play enhancing move I made.
I pay 42.95 for cable, and aside from the gaming, it is
a wonderful thing.
These are the three big things that made the most difference,
and i tried a whole bunch of stuff.
Started with 20 -40 FPs at 1280x1024 32
with routine system crippling situations.
Now 40-70 Fps at 1280x1024 16
Every now and then my system is clogged, far and
few between.
Now, its time for new puter:eek:
