Games

[leichaolan]

I may be a little bit off topic here, but seeing as how my question pertains to hardware, maybe not. Anyways, I've got a Athlon 750, 160m of ram, and a tnt2 with 32m. Anyways, I'm just wondering if I upgrade to 384m of ram, will I notice a marked improvement on my pc games? Especially in the framerate department. I just bought Max Payne and it runs well, but only when I put most of the video settings on medium (with 640 resolution)detail. High works okay but when there's a big room and more than 3 guys, slowdown occurs and my framerate goes out the window. What can I do (short of replacing anything expensive) to get better performance?

[iisbob]

Hi, leichaolan unfortunatelly the bottleneck in your system is not the main memory, rather the tnt video card you have. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif It just doesn't have the proccessing power to handle the advanced grahpics in the latest games. You should get a geforce2mx400, or ATI raedon-or if you can afford it go with a used geforce 2 ultra/gts etc. If you want real performance then you can shell out the bucks for a geforce3 ( it's worth the money http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif )

If your tnt is a pci card, then you're hampering your system all the more ( the pci bus is only 33mhz-whereas the agp bus is 66 ).


One of the major problems ( even with the new geforce3 ) is the memory bandwidth just isn't there even on todays high end systems to truely give you the performance you desire. Things are looking up with DDR and RAMbus, but until memory speeds catch up with processor and harddrives, they will be the main bottleneck in any system. Go here, Guru3d (http://www.guru3d.com) he has an excellant tutorial on this subject.

The worst performance hits ( even on the g3 ) come from enabling Anit-alias, simply put it's a program to smooth out the edges you se in the game, while it may look nice, it will cause a serious performance hit because the GPU is struggling to make the image look good instead of running the action. I would also try to upgrade your drivers, nvidia is constantly improving the command stucture of their software.

You're going to have to decide if you want to see the white's of the enemies eyes, or hear his death rattle. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

Make sure if you're on a 15" monitor run the game at 800x600, 16bit-and if a 17" 1024x768, also 16bit, i've yet to see a real diff in the 16 to 32 bit colors on a game, and the performance hit from 32bit just isn't worth it in my opnion.

make sure to diable any programs you have running in the background ( like anti-virus, screensaver, etc.) that you don't need, this will help free up system resources and cpu cycles for the game.



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iisbob
"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." --Albert Einstein (1879-1955)