video card help needed

turbodog

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I've been out of the game scene for a few years and need some advice on replacing my video card.

I've got an nvidia 4200 64mb agp card.
It runs doom3 at 39 fps.

I bought a 5500 nvidia 256mb card.
It runs at 15 fps.

I also bought a 6200 128mb card.
It runs at 35 fps.

What gives? I've got new drivers and directx. There are no other bottlenecks anywhere.

Recommendations on a good agp card that is KNOWN for SURE to beat 39 fps in doom3 by a good bit?
 

shaman

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Just a quick 0.02

Might want to check your bios and ensure that there is not a cap on the AGP slot. I know my 4200 is capable of running x8 but my slot can only give x4. That 256M card with the latest nvidia drivers should really be pushing pretty good...

Sincerely,

Shaman
 

Nitroz

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What is the speed/type of processor, type of mother board and amount of ram. The new video cards can place a larger strain on the computer because of the enhanced graphics and faster throughput on the AGP bus. Did that make since?
 

turbodog

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p4 3.0

asus

1gb



Nitroz said:
What is the speed/type of processor, type of mother board and amount of ram. The new video cards can place a larger strain on the computer because of the enhanced graphics and faster throughput on the AGP bus. Did that make since?
 

Nitroz

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Sounds like you have the computer specs covered. The Asus is the best motherboard out there.(IMO) The only other thing I can think of is if you have the AA(antialiasing) and other graphic intensive features turned on when playing these newer games it can really make a video card crawl even at 800x 600.
 

allthatwhichis

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You may be having an AGP Aperature issue. I think you are supposed to set it at 2x you video RAM size. If you were running a 64meg card and now you put a 256meg card in it is still using the same setting for the 64meg card.

Did you also boot into safe mode with the old card in, uninstall the video card driver, shut down... swap cards, reboot and install drivers. Sometimes, even with the same brand of GPU, you will need to do this. :candle:
 

Mad1

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35FPS is about right for a 6200.

I get about 60FPS on my 9800XT (AMD 3500 2.2Ghz, 2GB ram NF3)

Like Nitroz said turn some of the graphics down it will help alot.

Turn AA off completely, turn virtical sync off.

Also make sure you have a clean system, i.e. scan for spyware and virus's make sure your hard drive is defragged etc etc.

Pentiums arn't great for gaming Intel would even admit this. Gigahertz isnt everything. ;)
 

cyberhobo

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Actually, AGP aperature should be half the video RAM size. You could try bumping up the AGP bus latency.



allthatwhichis said:
You may be having an AGP Aperature issue. I think you are supposed to set it at 2x you video RAM size. If you were running a 64meg card and now you put a 256meg card in it is still using the same setting for the 64meg card.

Did you also boot into safe mode with the old card in, uninstall the video card driver, shut down... swap cards, reboot and install drivers. Sometimes, even with the same brand of GPU, you will need to do this. :candle:
 
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carrot

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I'm going to make a quick guess and say with the newer card(s), they're supporting (and rendering) shaders that the older ones don't, resulting in a loss of performance despite that they are newer and 'better.' Try playing with the graphical display options?
 

turbodog

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This is in low detail mode.

The drivers are clean.

The newer cards look wimpy compared to my original 4200. The 4200 has a massive heatsink on the gpu. It even has heatsinks on the ram.

The new cards have a small sink on the gpu and none on the ram.
 

chesterqw

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GPU creates heat. RAMs create only a little little little bit of heat. heatsinking it would be just for show.

but hey... if you really want to spend some mad amount of money...

get: AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-62 Dual Core Processor
Dual 512MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7900 GTX - SLI Enabled
a good motherboard and some low lantency RAMs.
now a good cooling system too :p

that is gonna cost a liver aka more then an arm and a leg.
 
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bfg9000

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BTW even though Doom3 requires DX9 it actually uses OpenGL so is traditionally faster with nVidia hardware than ATI. The later ATI drivers have mostly closed this gap so note those tests were done with Catalyst v4.9 from 2 years ago.

AGP 7800GS is about $285, 6800XT $137, and X800XT AIW is $129 if you send ATI a $2 card for their "trade up" program. It's difficult to find the ones actually on the list anymore.
 

Mad1

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turbodog your 4200 is probably faster than the 6200.

The Nvidia 4200 4400 4600 and 4800 are the best graphics cards nvidia has ever made (bar the geforce 2 GTS)

Not the best in performance these days but they can still play alot of high end games that are about today.

DirectX 10 stuff should be out next year when Vista comes out.

Im looking forward to playing Crysis. http://www.incrysis.com/
 

3rd_shift

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I had a geforce4 ti4600 agp.
It ran ok with doom3 most of the time.

Just so you know, the 5500 was a newer and slower adaptor.
The 6200 is not much more than the 6100 that is built into some Nforce shared memory mainboard chipsets.
If you step up to any of the 7xxx series, things get a lot better.
I'm running 2 7600gs 256 meg cards in pci express SLI mode,
with an Amd 64 3200 am2 socket.
I installed a card slot fan next to each card to keep them cool.

Another thing that speeds things up a lot is raid "0".
I'm running 4 seagate 300 gig sata2 drives in stripe mode for much faster boot up and game load times.
I now also have just over a terrabyte of hard drive capacity as a result from the striping.
If you are worried about a hard drive finking out, then raid 0+1 with 4-8 drives that were found on sale inside a larger comp case will do nicely.

Good system memory also helps.
I'm running 1 gig of pc6400 Corsair memory at the fastest settings the mainboard can support.

Result?
Doom3 and Quake4 both run smooth and fluid at my monitors supported maximum of 1600X1200 at 32 bit color depth. :rock:

The processor is not the main bottleneck at this stage.
 
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