Graphic/games speed

[Brett]

About 1 1/2 years ago I purchased an AMD KII 400, 65Mram and an 16Meg (AGP x 1) Nvidia TNT card thinking that graphics would zoom. Its first real test was UNREAL. My setup failed miserably. Its only smooth (and grainy) and playable at 320x400 with all the sound and graphice features turned off or down. I also download game demos to test my system (I'm going in) with the same result - almost unplayable. I recently borrowed 64mram, plugged it in, computer saw it OK but without any appreciable improvement. What will really improve my graphics? Will the TNT2 generation fix it or do I need 32Mram as opposed to 16Mram graphics accelerator because more ram does zip.

Could the game improve if I copy the CD on my HD?

Could my CDx16 be too slow feeding my accelerator?

Could an ATA33 HD be too slow feeding the graphic accelerator?

Or is my CD and HD OK and the problem lies with the speed and capacity of the accelerator?

Does the size of L1 and L2 cache have any performance bearing? Obviously the CPU speed is improved but does the AGP bus bypass any advantages there?

What about FSB speed. I notice that AMD have 200 FSB. With the same setup as above but changing the M/B to AMD 400 FSB 200 would I see an improvement?

Would a motherboard with AGP x 2 or x 4 be any quicker?

A lot of questions here but my understanding is fractured. At least I know that if I had an 800CPU it would work twice as fast but does it really come down to the speed and capacity of a graphics accelerator?

[Ghost_Hacker]

To play most of today's games you'll want at least 128MB of RAM, and a 2X AGP card with 32MB memory. I would recommend 256MB of RAM and a 4X AGP card with 64MB DDR memory.

Right now your performance suffers because of the AGP slot(First gen) and 16MB video card. Your processor and hard drive aren't holding you back.

I have 512MB of RAM a 4X AGP 32MB DDR Radeon and an Athlon 650 and I'm already looking for upgrades to make my gaming even faster ( I've yet to find any game that can slow it down but games are getting bigger and more complex all the time). So no matter what you have you could always improve. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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"It's just a whisper in my Ghost"

[Paleo Pete]

Is this a double post?

I've run Unreal on my P-200MMX with 32MB RAM, and it seems to run ok, except for freezing for about a second every few minutes, really not bad at all. In the user's manual it says to run it at 32 bit True Color for best performance, if you're not running at that setting try it, might make a difference.

P-200MMX, 32MB RAM, Matrox Mystique 2MB video card. Way slower system than yours and I can play Unreal, and the freezing is not bad enough to be a real problem, once every 5 minutes or so, and only for about a half second to a second. Quake II was worse...

Check your sound settings, and video resolution, both can affect game performance. If you have AGP you might also check the AGP Aperture size, I think 64MB is best for most adapters. It's in BIOS somewhere, you'll have to look around for it. It might also be related to AGP 2X too, some earlier boards that supported AGP 2X didn't do a very good job with it.

I'll have to install Unreal again and look around at the settings, see if I see anything in the game that might help. Right now it's not installed, just redid everything and haven't reinstalled it yet.

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