Where is the Bottle Neck?

[jacko]

Aces High is not running well at all on my pc...

I have a AMD 2.0 GHz Processor
1 Gig RAM

I had a ATI 9600 All in Garbage card... overclocked.. and it did pretty well.. or so so

I just bought a Vision Tek HD2600 (AGP)  Pro 512 mb card....

no real difference..

Any suggestions besides throwing it all away... cant afford new yet!!! 

[715]

I have a 2.8GHz P4.  When I upgraded from a 9600xt graphics card to a 7600GT I saw virtually no increase in performance.  I am almost entirely CPU limited.  You might be as well with that CPU.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Yes AH is CPU heavy. The 2Ghz AMD is getting old. Overclocking won't help much.

So you're facing a base system upgrade - I recommend moving to Intel. You can get an asrock mobo + intel cpu combo for $180 or so factory overclocked to 2.66Mhz. That will fly circles around your current AMD.

[Reschke]

As mentioned before your bottle neck is at the CPU. If you can get something different. I used to be an AMD fan but I switched back to Intel after many years in the other camp.

[wrongwayric]

You could try 1 more gig of memory not sure if that will help or not. I went from 1 gig up to 2 in my old amd machine. Think it was a 2ghz or maybe a 2.33ghz. I noticed a fairly large performance jump as far as programs running/loading up and they seemed to run more smoothly. Once again this could just have been my imagination but it sure seemed like it was better IMO.

[Wobbly]

I run an AMD 2.0, I Gig of Ram, Creative Audigy 4 soundcard and an Asus 6800Gt and get acceptable frame rates for me of 50 - 70 depending on the action.

You dont mention sound - if you are running onboard sound, this uses the processor, so get a seperate sound card. Also try turning down sound hardware acceleration a notch or two, make sure you defrag, delete all the clutter etc.

Also look at reducing other processes running - I dont bother but there are free programmes about that make this easy.

[Gixer]

I have a 2.8GHz P4.  When I upgraded from a 9600xt graphics card to a 7600GT I saw virtually no increase in performance.  I am almost entirely CPU limited.  You might be as well with that CPU.

Thats because the 7600GT was a crap card. Try a 8 series card or bang for buck 9600GT.


<S>...-Gixer

[715]

Thats because the 7600GT was a crap card. Try a 8 series card or bang for buck 9600GT.
<S>...-Gixer

I am afraid you miss my point.  The 7600GT is way faster than the (Radeon) 9600XT yet it made no difference because I'm CPU limited.  Overclocking the 9600XT also made no difference, so no matter how fast a GPU I add, I will still be limited by my CPU.  AH, like many flight sims, is CPU limited in many cases.  Look at Tomshardware benchmarks for MS Flight Sim X: the fps are virtually the same for all but the very poorest graphics cards.  It is are limited by the CPU.

Now it is true that what I say is wrong if you try to run at very high screen resolution and with AA enabled- then you can start to be GPU limited.

[Gixer]

I am afraid you miss my point.  The 7600GT is way faster than the (Radeon) 9600XT yet it made no difference because I'm CPU limited.  Overclocking the 9600XT also made no difference, so no matter how fast a GPU I add, I will still be limited by my CPU.  AH, like many flight sims, is CPU limited in many cases.  Look at Tomshardware benchmarks for MS Flight Sim X: the fps are virtually the same for all but the very poorest graphics cards.  It is are limited by the CPU.

Now it is true that what I say is wrong if you try to run at very high screen resolution and with AA enabled- then you can start to be GPU limited.

Firstly you can't compare the CPU/Graphic usage of AH to FSX. Secondly while FSX is more CPU/Ram dependent then the latest GPU and currently no SLI support. You still need a very good graphics card. Anything less then 512mb and 8 series just won't cut it. You need a balanced system, CPUs,RAM,Graphics. No point having a 3Ghz CPU if your running a 6 series GPU and vice versa.

AH yes, you can run any old card and still get good frame rates.


<S>...-Gixer

[Anodizer]

Thats because the 7600GT was a crap card. Try a 8 series card or bang for buck 9600GT.


<S>...-Gixer

Couldn't agree with you more!  Even though there is one guy here who thinks the 7600GT (or GS for that matter) is a really great card, it was crap from the get go.  As far as 8 series cards, if I were on a budget, I'd go with an 8600GTs which is a semi decent card if you're on a budget and will play almost anything out there (but probably not at the best resolution with AA and AF turned up).  Although the 8800 GS/GT/GTX/GTX/ULTRA series cards would be the way to go and most of those will play anything at high resolutions with AA+AF respectably.  Or even the 9600's!  Those cards sweet rawk!

[715]

I'll try one last time.  Suppose I increase the clock and memory speed of my graphics card by 20%.  If my frames per second go up by 20% then I am obviously limited by my graphics card.  If my frames per second do not change at all (which is what actually happened) then I am CPU limited and a faster graphics card is useless.

(And the 7600GT is not that bad a card.  At the time it was the fastest AGP card available, other than the 7950 which drew monster amounts of power and generated too much heat.  Obviously there are better PCIe cards now but that requires replacing absolutely everything, mobo, CPU, RAM, power supply, even the case.)

[llama]

715 is right on the money:

At the time of its release, the 7600GT was the best AGP card out there, beating the 7800GS and using less electricity to do it. It is a significant upgrade over the ATI 9600 and 9800 AGP cards that a lot of people were replacing with it.

Games other than AH, such as CounterStrike: Source, saw a significant framerate increase by swapping the older cards I mentioned with the 7600GT. In AH, however, in these 4 or 5 year old machines the CPU is the limiting factor.

Jacko, at this point, if you are trying to increase the performance of AH on your rig, then more CPU speed is the way to go. Overclocking will get you small gains - figure a 10% overclock will get you about 10% more framerate. Getting a faster CPU that still fits into your vintage motherboard can help so, but only to a degree. If you can find an Athlon at 3 GHz that fits your motherboard (and I'm afraid I just don't know the AMD chips of that vintage anymore), then your framerates should improve about 50% over what you have. If I were to guess, you have an "Athlon XP" with a PR Rating of +2000, and the highest that generation of chips went was +2800, which I see goes for $68 on Pricewatch.com's list of vendors. That would translate into a 40% framerate increase, which means if you current get 30 FPS on average, the upgrade would get you 42 FPS on average.

The better videocard should let you increase the Antialiasing levels without hurting framerate, which smooths the "jaggies." Therefore, you could decrease your resolution (from 1280x1024 to 1024x768, for example) which increases your CPU-limited framerate, and then increase antialiasing levels to get rid of the resulting "jaggies." You can (and should) also reduce the texture size and play with the visial detailing sliders to increase framerate too.

So while you can't expect miracles, you can get some improvements if your system settings aren't already optimal.

-Llama