Archbishop: Graphics card upgrade "knackers" performance

[1480]

Originally Posted by Cohaagen

I decided to put off building a new box for another six months and replaced my Geforce 6200 PCI with a brand new 8500GT (also PCI) instead. The card is surprisingly good, particularly so considering all the peevish naysaying virgins who claim that even £10 spent on a PCI card is £10 wazzed up the wall...it chews through HL2: Episode Two (full detail/HDR/x2AA/x8AF and about 45fps average), Portal (same), S.T.A.L.K.E.R., CS3 and Illustrator, Autocad and a few other things I've been running.

Problem is, GWX now runs like a three-legged dog. Even with AA and AF off I barely get 10fps on bridge/external - I was getting 30+ before with the 6200 with both of those on.

P4 Northwood 2.8
1.5gb RAM
Sparkle Geforce 8500GT PCI, 256mb DDR2 (box-clocked at 450/900/400)
Forceware 169.21 (the latest)
nearly zero fragmentation and no crap (ie. Norton) running in background

I am completely stuck. The 6200 is on eBay so I can't fall back on that option. I've changed nothing else except the card, so I'm stumped as to what the problem may be. No artifacts or anything weird on screen...very strange. If anyone has had a similar problem, I'd really appreciate a helpy-out here. As much as I love HL2, the card is a step down for me if it can't run SH3.

I have the same card. This thread should take care of the problem:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=128517

Pegging consistent high 30's fps with a lot of activity high 40's everywhere else....

[Cohaagen]

Thanks for posting that, mate, but it hasn't helped (I tried the nHancer settings anyway). Ran at 7fps average.

My problem isn't with Anti-Aliasing, AF or anything like that - the game runs like cack even without it. I use Powerstrip, probably the most powerful tweak program there is, which works at hardware-level rather than through the registry. Even it hasn't helped, and is telling me my card has 512mb RAM instead of 256, is PCI-E x1 and not PCI, and has no latency settings (which I suspect is the problem).

I've changed drivers, etc. ad nauseum without success. I'm going to change slots as a last-ditch effort, and if that doesn't work I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up on GWX for good.

[Fenris_Wolf]

A weird problem indeed. :hmm:

Have you tried changing the BIOS settings of your motherboard? If not, then go ahead. Particularly there should be a "aperture size" or something similar (it's called that for AGP slots but no idea about PCI). It governs the bandwidth between your GPU and motherboard. See if you can increase it. Also the latency of the PCI slot is worth tweaking with but within safe limits.

Second thing to try before you give up: Get firmware updates for your motherboard's BIOS and, somewhat less importantly, your GPU's BIOS. That might be the problem (or a part of it) because older motherboards and their graphics interface were designed with slower hardware in mind. So that might do the trick.

Some game settings like reducing the texture size used in SH3's game engine might help. Because a PCI interface's main difference is that there is much less bandwidth available (rate of flow of data) as compared to AGP or PCI-E.

Lastly, see how the game's FPS are when out at sea far away from a harbor. If distance to a habor makes a difference then increasing the task priority for sh3.exe in the task manager might help. Increase it to "high priority".

Is the problem occuring with GWX 1.03 or GWX 2.0?

Have you tried running the stock game?

Another thing to check: Is there greatly increased harddisk activity while playing?

What resolution are you running the game at? Higher resolutions need higher rate of flow of data and any bottle necks significantly hamper FPS performance. So running another game at 800x600 and running GWX at 1280x1024 is going to have significantly different FPS numbers.

[Cohaagen]

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

[deepboat]

So, my X600 card can't keep up with the video. Which card would you suggest? I'd like it to play MOH Airborne but the budget is limited.

[Fenris_Wolf]

Some suggestions come to mind.

- Try reinstalling SH3. To be honest, when you upgrade hardware it is strongly recommended to do a clean install of windows, too. It could be that the SH3 game has older graphics settings saved for the older video card. That happens sometimes with some games. Or it might be a faulty driver that didn't get removed with the new ones.

- It could be an infected/damaged sh3.exe or some other important file. Do an online virus scan. If you google for it, Norton has a free online virus scanner/remover. :P

- See if the GWX 2.0 icon has compatibility mode for win2k. Change it back or change it to win2k. No harm in trying.

- Lastly, see how the game's FPS are when out at sea far away from a harbor. If distance to a habor makes a difference then increasing the task priority for sh3.exe in the task manager might help. Alt+tab out of the game and increase it to "high priority".

- Do you have Episode 2 and SH3 installed in the same hard disk?

- It might even be a StarFarce related problem. Damaged DVD perhaps? Hint: StarForce can be uh.. *cough* removed *cough*....

But seriously, that is one really weird problem and I wish I had more proper advice but I don't, and unless you're very lucky it'll take some effort on your part to troubleshoot it.

Good luck.