Can't play - Too slow - Need advise!!

[Reece]

Hi, well so much for the minimum specs on box, mine is way ahead there but even with all graphic settings down It is still unplayable, there is no way I can upgrade to a new system till atleast the end of year! I could save my pennies for a GFX card or ram but will even that be any good? My machine specs:

Asus A8V Deluxe
Athlon 64 3700+
1gig PC3200 DDR400 ram
ATI X700 256

Any advise welcome.

[Mentalist]

You have a solid CPU there so you don't have to think about upgrading that. 1GB of memory is sufficienct but 2GB is a lot better for a game like SHIV. Luckily, memory is rather cheap to upgrade compared to other components.

As for your GFX card... I'm not sure. I don't know the comparisons of ATI to Nvidia cards but I'm assuming that is your bottleneck. A new GFX card may well be in order.


For the meantime, make sure you have the newest drivers for your GFX card and that you have no superfluous processes running in the background. Stuff like active Anti Virus programs can butcher games FPS. Do a defragment of your drive as well. If you're still getting unplayable slowdown on low settings then I'm gussing you will need a new card.

I would reccomend this one here:


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...C-pr1c3grabb3r


The price to performance ratio is unmatched. That's a powerful card at a very reasonable price and it will run SHIV pretty well alongside abother GB of memory and will even do well without it.


Good luck.

[Gizzmoe]

Reece, check if both Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering are set to Application Controlled in the ATI control panel, if not, change it. Also try the Omegadriver, an optimized version of the ATI driver, it provides a bit more FPS:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/

You could also try and overclock your card.

[Reece]

Thanks, both the Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering are set to Application Controlled, and although drivers may help, it would be very marginal, I think the video card is the problem, when on deck moving the mouse cursor is in slow motion, the same as left clicking then moving left to right to view things! I had the same thing when I purchased SH3 at that time I had an nvidia FX5200 card then & upgraded to the one I have now & I could then spin around 360 with no lagging whatsoever, & super fast. I suppose I will just have to sort through which card to get, this mobo has an AGP slot only, no PCIE, so when I upgrade to a new mobo the new card will be useless!! But thats progress!!
Cheers.

[Reece]

Anyone know a good overclocking program, is one supplied with the Omega drivers?
May as well give it a go!!

[Gizzmoe]

Originally Posted by Reece

Anyone know a good overclocking program, is one supplied with the Omega drivers?

Omegadriver comes with ATI Tray Tools, right-click the taskbar icon, then go to Hardware -> Overclocking Settings.

[XanderF]

Well, while Tom's Hardware is overall crap (ENORMOUS Intel bias, and pretty healthy nVidia bias, too), it can give you a relative picture of performance. For example, compare the 3dMark06 numbers for a GeForce 6600GT (realistically the "minimum" card for Sh4) with yours (blue bars):

linkage

I think it's safe to say it's your video card holding you back. (Although, truth be told, your CPU is also getting long in the tooth, and 1gb of ram isn't near enough to play this game. It loads 1.1gb into ram on its own, forget all the operating system stuff you need to keep loaded in ram for things to work smoothly.)

I have an X1950 Pro (also on that chart), and I'm pretty pleased with the performance of it. It CAN get a touch...slower...at times. But I have all settings absolutely cranked, and only in the BUSIEST of scenes does it show any weakness. Even then, it's still easily "smooth" by X700 standards, I only comment on it because it does slow down noticeably over this card's peak performance in these instances (IE., your card with medium-ish graphics might be regularly getting 10fps in a scene, which will appear jerky - the X1950 Pro will sometimes noticeably drop down to 30fps from 60+ with maxed graphics.)

EDIT: My 'full' system specs
AMD Opteron 165 @ 2.0ghz
2gb OCZ Platinum @ DDR500
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512mb
Western Digital 250gb SATA HDD w/ 7200rpm and 16mb cache
Creative Labs Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
(This plays Sh4 'well', although I can't imagine on other systems. Everyone else at the office has WAYYY better PCs than I do.)

[Gizzmoe]

Originally Posted by XanderF

Well, while Tom's Hardware is overall crap (ENORMOUS Intel bias, and pretty healthy nVidia bias, too)

I read Tomshardware for many years, I´m a big fan of AMD and ATI and I say that they are actually very objective and unbiased. When AMD/ATI was the best combination they praised them, now they praise Intel/nVidia because those companies currently provide the best solutions for high-end systems, and they have no problem recommending for example the ATI X1950 card as the best card of the $200 segment. Tomshardware really is a great place for everyone looking for hardware advice.

[XanderF]

Originally Posted by Gizzmoe

I read Tomshardware for many years, I´m a big fan of AMD and ATI and I say that they are actually very objective and unbiased. When AMD/ATI was the best combination they praised them, now they praise Intel/nVidia because those companies currently provide the best solutions for high-end systems, and they have no problem recommending for example the ATI X1950 card as the best card of the $200 segment. Tomshardware really is a great place for everyone looking for hardware advice.

You must have missed the series of articles where they had "unbiased" server testing of AMD vs Intel and had to restart the Intel server 6 times due to 'configuration issues' before it finally stayed up longer than the AMD server. Of course, the clear winner was Intel as it DID stay up longer. Never mind it had to be re-started 6 times to the AMD server's one.

Or the entire series of articles on how dangerous the AMD AthlonXP processors were - if you took the heatsink off them and forced the computer to stay on, they'd catch fire and burn down your house and kill your dog! Intel CPUs, of course, would NEVER do that (except the immediately previous generation, which they conveniently omit).

I could go on for pages, but it's rather here nor there.

It's certainly an okay site, but for 'objectivity', nobody beats FiringSquad, XBitLabs, Tech Report, or (to a lesser extent) HardOCP or Anandtech. (It's worth mentioning that, at least at one point or another, linking to Tom's Hardware was banned on all 5 of those site's forums due to the periods of intense journalistic dishonesty THG participated in.)

(And PPS - I don't have a bias against any of these vendors. We moved to Portland, Oregon a few years back - just a few miles from the Intel headquarters. Buying Intel is buying local jobs for me, so I do have a certain favoritism to them, perhaps offset by my interest in 'the underdog' AMD. In any case, the clear performance crown at the moment is with Intel and nVidia , and I'd certainly recommend any new construction be a Core 2 chip with a GeForce 8800.)

[Gizzmoe]

Whatever. I first visited them like 7 years ago and read hundreds of their articles, fact is that I saw them bashing and praising all kinds of companies over the years, sometimes they lean towards ATI, sometimes nVidia, sometimes AMD, sometimes Intel, all depending on the current market/performance situation. You can´t expect 100% objectivity in 100% of their articles, no website has that. Overall it´s a very objective site, though it can never hurt to get a second opinion from other tec sites, like the ones you´ve listed.

[Reece]

Well after seeing that chart an X700 Pro performed 640fps compared to the top cards at around 4300fps, and mine isn't even a Pro!! What is the point of overclocking, gee, I might, with a bit of luck, push 650fps!! WOW, warp speed for sure!!:rotfl:
For some reason I think I will give overclocking a miss!

[Hartmann]

This recommendations are far away from ubi specs:

I think that recommended specs from ubi readme are the minimun in reality.

change it for this:

No play Configuration:

WinXP/VISTA Only
DirectX 9.0c
2 GHz Pentium 4, AMD Athlon, or equivalent
1024 MB RAM
128MB DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0 capability
DirectX 9.0C compatible sound device

-minimun Configuration:

Win XP/VISTA Only
DirectX 9.0c
3 GHz Pentium 4, AMD Athlon or equivalent
2048 MB RAM
256MB DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0 capability

Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI(r): 9600/9700/9800, X300 to X850, X1300 to X1800
NVIDIA(r): 6200/6600/6800/7800

Not Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI(r): 9200 and below/9500
NVIDIA(r): 5200 and below/5600/5700/5800/5900
Laptop models of these cards are not supported.

[malkuth74]

Someone mentioned that Putting AA and AF in your drivers to Software helped them out alot with Frame Rates. Don't know why that is, but I guess its worth a try.