low fps on a fx5900 why ?

[||BOD||FLUX]

I had a g4 ti 4200 on a xp2000/4xagp 768meg pc2600 when i played hl2 i was getting in the low 20 to the mid 40 in fps depending on where in the game i was . I just upgraded to an xp2600+/8xagp 512megs 400mgz ram and an fx 5900 but i can barely see any improvment in fps I made sure the new board had the 8x enabled and i have the newest drivers from nvidia is there more i can do, I am still in the high 20's to low 50's fps and that dont make me happy after spending what i did, did I just expect too much or what?

thanks for any info :shrug:

[brickout]

It could be that your 5900's performance in DX9 is similar to your old card's performance in DX8.
HL2 runs on lower DX versions if your card can't handle DX9...

Does the game at least look better?

[Westline]

Man, what are you smokin. You obviously are doing something wrong. I had an old Pentium 4 2.66ghz with 1gb of DDR333 ram and a fx 5900(128mb) and I played HL2 with all the settings on high(1024x768) and played with 80-120 fps throughout the whole game. My motherboard was only 4x agp also, so I was not even maximizing preformance. I think there has to be something wrong with your configuration. What is your resolution in HL2 and the settings?

[||BOD||FLUX]

1024x768 is the resolution, I tried the max on all but aa and anti I set those to none and trilinear respectivly. I just did a 3dmark 2005 freebee version and scored a whopping 1153 with an average of 3 to 7 fps on the test this is pitiful

[Westline]

hmmm... You scored in the same area as I did in 3Dmark05. You settings are identical in HL2 also. Maybe your card is overheating, I had a Stock AMD 3200 Heatsink on my 5900. Also what brand card did you have?

[||BOD||FLUX]

chaintech, it seems to be a very good card I can o/c it to 415/975 with no stability problems using cool bits, but my perfprmance seems the same as stock speeds so i left it alone

[Westline]

Nothing wrong with Chaintech, good cards. Have you tried using 800X600? See what fps that gives you.

[DaSpEcSter]

I had a mx200 that I could overclock but the more I oc'd it the less performance I'd get out of it..
Also my friend has a fx5600 and it does the exact same thing.

I couldn't understand if when you oc'd it if you put them back to stock or left that oc'd...but if you kept them oc'd then put them back and try it.

[Stoanhart]

Doesn't seem that wrong. The RAM is probably holding you back a bit. You downgraded the size. 1gb is the gaming sweet spot, especially for new games like HL2.

A friend of mine has a xp2500+ and the 5900xt and 512mb sys RAM. He runs 1024x768 with no AA/AS, medium textures, and the rest high, and it's ok speed wise.

It is most likely what someone said above. You are running in DX9 mode now. More fancy shader effects 'n stuff. If you force DX8 in the console, you can get a real comparison to your old system.

[techun]

how do i force dx8?
this will help my horrible 5200...right? lol

[Prodigious]

FX series cards only run in dx 8.1 by default. you dont have to force anything.

In fact, the only way to run hl2 in dx9 on 5xxx series cards is to either use a card id hack or force it in the config settings. You may have thought you were running in dx9, but you werent.

[Stoanhart]

really? I thought the 5xxx series was dx9 (poor dx9, but dx9 none the less).

what would be the cause of his little performance gain, because in the same mode he should see a siginficant boost, even if he gets some stuttering here and there due to the low amount of ram.

[Prodigious]

FX cards are dx9 capable(although they cheat in some aspects). However, stupid nvidia for some reason decided to forego a partial precision mode. Basically the cards can operate at 16bit 24bit or 32bit. 24 and 32 meet the official dx9 spec, 16 does not. Ati cards are capable of running at 24(also known as partial precision) but nvidia cards can only run at 16 or 32(32 being full precision, but much more demanding).

There is a lot of debate over this topic but to put it simply, 5xxx series cards would never be powerful enough to run hl2 reasonably at 32bit precision, so thats out of the question, and since they arent engineered to run 24bit either, they cant do that. So basically you're stuck with 16bit, which is subpar for the dx9 spec and therefore valve decided to limit the fx line to dx8.1.

The current 6 series of geforce cards are powerful enough to run at full 32bit precision and therefore valve allowed dx9 on those cards.

It should be noted that most devs cut corners and allow cards like the fx series to run in dx9 mode even though its not doing certain things quite up to spec. However, and this is why many people got ****ed at valve, no such concessions were made for halflife 2.