Anybody using ATI?

[letterboy1]

Are you looking at AGP or PCI Express cards? If AGP, I'd wait and see what ATI is planning to do as far as supporting AGP cards. Their last two or three driver releases gave many AGP card users problems. A potential work-around for this is to use Omega drivers . . . I haven't tried them yet, though, but might when Crysis is released if ATI don't fix their drivers.

EDIT: Never mind about the AGP question.

Anyway, I'm using an X1950 Pro with 512 MB RAM. It runs SH4 nicely with all in-game graphics options maxed except post processing is disabled (a matter of preference for me). I'm also using the ROW mod with high resolution sea foam. My screen resolution is 1360x768 and I have 2x FSAA enabled. The only time I have any slowdown is the first time the hi-rez sea foam (ROW mod) gets loaded.

[odjig292]

I was talked into an ATI 1550 and have only had one crash but have kept the graphics on low. I've been in the middle of a couple of large convoys and task forces without problem. So far, I'm still happy with it, even though my RAM is only at the 1.0 meg level, but I have two hard drives and have all the VM on the lesser used drive.

[CaptainHaplo]

I run a x1650 Pro (512 onboard) and an Athlon 4200 (Dual 2.2 Ghz) with 2G's of Ram. Running ROW with graphics maxed out I get no slowdown in major convoys. Although - I noted your running alot higher res than I - being "old school" I run everything at 1024x768 still (heck I remember balking when everyone told me to ditch dos - I still have my 6.22 disks! - nevermind rez changes.) Remember that the higher the resolution -the harder the pc and vid processor have to work - which could be your bottleneck. Try dropping the resolution down would be the first thing I would look at doing - the true visual difference isnt major and the card your running should be perfectly comfortable with a "base" resolution like 1024x768. *When you do the math your actually asking the vid card to do what - about 25% more work pixel wise with that resolution...*

The second thing is to make sure your not running alot of stuff in the background. There are a number of process viewer apps out there - find one and kill everything you dont need. Its amazing the stuff that runs in the background that just sucks up CPU cycles. Once you know what you can kill and what you can't msconfig and the regedit app are great to get rid of the extraneous drag. Use some common sense - disconnect from the internet (ipconfig /release works great for DHCP machines) and kill your firewall and antivirus stuff temporarily - but make sure they are back up and going before you reconnect (ipconfig /renew in case you needed it)

There are a few other tricks - but these should help get you started.