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Problems with slowdown...

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Mezzanine

New Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Hi,

I have had problems with my Gateway computer ever since I purchased it about a year and a half ago (almost). So far I have found NOTHING I could do to stop this problem. The thing is, I can go over 100 fps in games (like unreal tournament) then drop all the way down to 30. I noticed that the more lighting there is, the slower I go. The slowdown is also caused by more objects showing up on screen. In the 8-Light test in 3DMark 2001 SE (and the older one), it slows so much it's unbearable. I don't think I should get this much slowdown in games like Unreal though. However, it happens in all games, including Everquest, Jedi Knight II, anything you could think of. Here are my system specs:

-MSI K7T Pro (Gateway modified) w/ KT133 Chipset
-Athlon Thunderbird 1.1 Ghz CPU
-384 MB PC133 SD-RAM
-Abit Siluro GeForce 3 Ti200 (started with stock GeForce 2 GTS/PRo)
-Windows XP Pro (currently)
-NVidia Det 28.90 Drivers
-Latest BIOS from Gateway (pretty old updated last year)

Well, I've tried the following to attempt to fix the problem over the past year:

-Formatting and installing several versions of Windows (98,ME, XP).
-Trying nearly all Detonator drivers from 5.xx and up.
-Putting more Ram in (started with 128, upgraded to 384)
-Trying all the versions available of DirectX (the problem persists with OpenGL)
-Getting updated drivers AND patches for ALL the devices on my system (including sound card: SoundBlaster LIVE!Value)
-Messing with BIOS settings (though Gateway barely lets one do anything with their BIOS settings, I can't change most of the things that are standard on all motherboards)
-Installing the latest VIA 4in1's (4.38 I believe)
-Installing patches for 4 way memory interleaving

Just for the record, though this problem persists, I get about 5300 on my 3DMark scores. I'd figure this was normal considering I got the low 3000's with my GeForce 2 Pro card. Can someone verify this (these scores are based on default settings at 1024x768 res). I'm really running out of ideas. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

-Mezzanine
 
welcome to the forums Mezzanine!

Sounds to me like your system is behaving perfectly normally. You say your card is bogging down when presented with highly complex scenes with multiple lights- this isn't a problem! ALL vid cards will do this, even a GF3 in a fat Ghz Athlon system. Especially since your GF3 has support for several advanced DX8.1 graphics features- when faced with applying these features, your card slows down because it's dealing with a LOT more complex opeartions than otherwise. The more onscreen action, the more data your card has to deal with, and the less fast it can pipe it to the screen.

The only fix here is to get a faster CPU- that will raise the fill rate of your system, which in turn raises the minimum/maximum framerate you will see. You could always try turning down the detail on your games- just flipping from 32bit to 16bit color is usually enough to almost double framerates, at nearly zero loss of visual quality.

Example- my GTS usually zips through Quake 3 at around 100FPS. In the middle of intense firefights, it will dip to less than 30 quite often due to the added complexity of all the bots and rockets etc zipping around. Solution: lower graphics quality, or avoid intense firefights:D
 
try making a search for projects like yours at the gamershq so you can compare the fps in the same tests.
 
I can just pick out a bit of jerkiness when running 3DMark with FSAA on on that 8 light test thingy... But my settings are a bit insane...
 
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