Bottle neck for this system?

[Ripsnort]

800EB intel PIII
32 meg. Geforce 2 Pro o/c'd to 250 mhz.
256 meg PC-133 ram
Win98

Where would the bottleneck be here?  the chip?  I guess what I am asking, is...would I be able to squeeze out more FPS if I went to a  64 meg. Geforce 4?

Currently, in the old "AH benchmark test" (Field A1, pick B17, 50% fuel, 12X500, spawn in hangar, bring up clipboard, etc) I get about 29 FPS.  Needless to say I'm hitting single digits around smoking fields when I fly thru the smoke....

[krazyhorse]

geforce2mx 64mb usaully about 75 fr , cable, pent4 2.0 512ddr, had probs with my ole puter though

[Lephturn]

Debatable Rip, but I'd say CPU.  Check Skuzzy's site... I think he tested some of this type of thing.  I can't remember the URL.. look in Hardware/Software or give him a poke in there for the URL.

[bockko]

 i just upgraded from a p3 866 to a 1.8 gig p4. I ran around 43 fps on my old system, tnt2 pro video, 256k ram. Check your ah video setup to see if you are in 32 or 16 bit...16 bit runs much faster. Try a lower resolution setting too, I ran my 866 p3 in 800x600. Your bottle neck is most likely the cpu, if your motherboard supports it you could toss in a faster one at fairly low cost. Your vid card is nice, your ram is fine, pc 133 is good. One other  thing is to make sure no unnecessary programs are running like outlook, instant messenger, etc. And in the smoke your frame rate will drop way down. Good luck!

[phentop]

The bottle neck is in the card.. a faster CPU is nice when running CAD programs. Unfortunatly the gaming industry hasnt caught up
to the speed of the CPU so unless your just a speed freek ( which most of us are) you can save a little money yet and just upgrade your card and possibly another 256 of mem if you have room since it's so cheap and get the performance you are looking for......  remember this gaming is geared at the moment tward the graphic processor and the system mem - they havn't caught up to the processor speeds yet ...

[Am0n]

The bottle neck in that system is certainly the video card.  AH uses "D3D TnL" which moves "transformation and lighting" instructions of the CPU  to the video card. That CPU even though it is a pentium is plently of processing power once those instructions are routed to another device, thus lightening the processing load and freeing up bandwith on the CPU. (this function is great for low end CPUs eg 500mhz, but your cpu wont merit much from this technology..)

Since SDRAM is so inexpensive these days i dont think it would hurt to get 256 more megs of ram either, you wont see much of a increase if that is the only upgrade you proform but the more the marrier.


The video card you have if im not mistaken is using SDRAM on-board and has a very limited bandwith. Over clocking the GPU to great numbers is not going to increase frames more than slightly, if you want better O/C results you need to increase the SDRAM's clock cycle speed aswell since it is the bottle neck of the card. Also the core speed of the GPU on the GF2 is very slow in comparison to say a Geforce4MX (which is 149$ right now). I could be wrong about the SDRAM on the card it could very well be DDR so excuse me if im misleading.

I will say if you got the cash to toss around the best bargin on the market today for graphics cards is either the Geforce 3 TI200, or the ATI Raedon 8500. Of course there is better cards out there but they are also 300$+.

Recently i just went from a duron 800 to a Tbird 1.4ghz and only increased frames when there is nothing but "sky" on my screen. that is due to the lack of texture memory on the card and the above stated bandwith issues. (i have a geforce II MX400 32meg)

One last note: these reults may very, i just built a PC for my cousin this weekend that contridicts what im about to tell you so it may not be the same for all.

When i run 3Dmark 2000 in windows98SE vrs windowsXP Professional on my computer the results differ tremendously. In the 3dMark benchmarking software the higher the score the better. I get 5600 when in the winXP OS, when i run it in windows 98 im scoring a sour 4500+. As i stated above the results very, in my cousins PC when we tested it, it actualy scores better in windows 98 when compared the same benchmark in XP.

So there is a chance that upgrading to XP professional could yeild better results for you. I wouldnt recomend buying it to find out since it would be a wasted 200$ if it was unsucessful. You need to find a friend who will loan you a copy to test.

sorry im starting to write a essay!! lol

good luck

[Ripsnort]

Incidently, I use 800 res, 32 bit color, I experimented with all of them, and 1024 res, 32 bit gives best FR.  Believe it or not, 800 res, 32 bit was worse FR than 1024 !

Thanks all above for replies...still undecided if I should dump $500 for a new system or simply upgrade the video card...one is short term solution, one is longer term solution.

[Ripsnort]

Thks for taking the time to write that Amon

[Eagler]

I'd vote for new vid card too.

Got bigger boost when I went from voodoo 5500 to Geforce 2 ultra 64mb than when I went from P3 800 to T-Bird 1.33

gl

[bockko]

ripsnort, just curious how your lower frame rate number does in 32 bit compared to 16 bit. I have built several systems over the years for flight sims, and my humble opinion is that while high frame rate #'s are nice, the rate when things are busy is what you need to tune the system to. So when you are around the field, lotsa planes, is 32 bit still faster than 16 bit? The reason I ask is on my 866 I checked both, 32 was about the same until things got busy then it slowed down more than the 16 bit did. On the new 1.8 gig (gforce 2 mx400, 32 meg) I run in 1280x1024, but still use 16 bit because it holds up much better than 32 bit around the smoke, hangars and hordes of vulching fighters. Anyway, if you buy a 'nicer' card and it doesn't satisfy your needs, spring for the cpu/mobo too hehe. As I tell my wife when new computer parts arrive at the house "hey, I COULD be out at a bar instead!" lol.

Good luck!

[Ripsnort]

bockko, only tried 16 bit once, couldn't stand the stair stepped colors of the sunset, so I never went back.

[Am0n]

NP Ripsnort

What i would do if i were you is go buy a video card simply test it, if it doesnt do what you want to take the sucker back!

when going for more FPS video card is 99% of the time the problem. Heck i used to run a old k6-2 500mhz (very crappy) with a Voodoo 3 3000 (*shudders*) plus 98 megs of ram and would get 15-25 FPS in half-life. I put my geforce II in there to check it out and even with that crappy cpu and low ram i was getting 60+ FPS. Anything running D3d or OpenGL is relative in proformance to the video card hardware, while running in "software" would be relative to the CPU+RAM.

[Sox62]

Originally posted by Ripsnort
Incidently, I use 800 res, 32 bit color, I experimented with all of them, and 1024 res, 32 bit gives best FR.  Believe it or not, 800 res, 32 bit was worse FR than 1024 !

 That's not surprising.The Geforce II's and on up are optimized for higher resolutions.

As for your bottleneck...it's a little of both as far as your cpu and video card are concerned.There ARE faster video cards,but I wouldn't call the Geforce II a major bottleneck.If you had a Voodoo III,or a TNT II I would.

You might consider upgrading your cpu andmotherboard to an AMD,with the motherboard based on the KT133 chipset.That way you can still use the pc133 ram you have. You can get the Tbird 1.4,and a motherboard for about $200,maybe less(online).

[Ripsnort]

Maybe I'll take baby steps here, do the Vid upgrade (I'm going to have to upgrade that anyway when I go to another 'puter) then even if it doesn't do much, I'll still have it for the next system, which most likely won't be much later than Oct.

Thanks again for all your input.