Fenris_Wolf,
The latency of the card's slot is locked for some reason and I can't change it with either with Powerstrip nor PCI Latency Config. I didn't have that problem with my PNY 6200 (also PCI) and had its latency set to 32, which cured my
Half Life 2 stuttering long ago. I'm beginning to think that the card works through a PCI-to-PCIe bridge, as Everest, Powerstrip, Rivatuner and CPU-Z/GPU-Z report it as "PCIe x16 @ x1", that is to say, it's recognised as running at PCIe x1. It may be that the card is identical to the PCIe version except for interface and a little hardwiring. The 6200 came up as a pure PCI device.
As for the motherboard, it's a Dell, so the settings are again locked. Very annoying. I
think I recall setting the AGP aperture was set to maximum when I was tweaking the 6200 many moons ago, so I'll check it out. Having said that, I'm pretty sure it doesn't affect PCI. Likewise, all drivers/BIOS up to date. Just updated drivers for PCI controller, PCI-to-PCI bridge, hard disk, etc. with no joy. Perhaps there's an angle in BIOS flashing that might help, but NiBiTor doesn't give anything like that. Incidentally, though there's no PCIe slot (x1 or x16) Everest says the board (Intel i845
)will do x16, though I doubt that somehow.
Texture size: this shouldn't be an issue. The 6200 PCI had no problems at all with SH3. It ran it much better, as I mentioned. I'm on GWX 2.0, by the way, and resolution is 1024x768 as always. No bottleneck back when with the 6200 in that instance either. I run all my Source-based games in 1024x768 and they give me no problems. Even
Portal and
Episode 2, which are
much more GPU-intensive than SH3, run like a dream with HDR, x2 (and even x4) AA, x16AF, high detail textures and shading, and post-processing effects on the 8500GT. I can't imagine how running stock SH3 would make any difference, and even if it did I couldn't bear to go back.
No disk thrashing either, pagefile is 1512mb - same as always. Tried increasing it to 2gb...no help there.
(I've tried it OCed and at standard speeds. It's not overclocking that's doing it)
I'm stumped. Like I said earlier, if it's not sorted by tonight I'm going to jack it in with SH3 for now
