| Odd Question, how can you pinpoint your comp's deficiency - Click HERE for Original Thread |
| po9rs4ch4e |
| when running a demanding vid. game. If your comp meets the standard requirements for let's say "Doom 3" or something like that.. where could it be going wrong? Ram, vid card, processor? or is there more :dunno: |
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| ManHunter |
Try 3DMark from madonion.com. it's a good computer benchmark program.
MH |
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| Z3r03rr0r |
Well meeting the min requirements is one thing meeting the recommended is another. The minimum reqs are bare minimum to get the game to load and with a game the likes of Doom 3 the processor reqs are not as important as the vid card. THe way that the engine for the game was diesigned it loads alot of info the the vid card for preproccesing so the more ram on the vid card the better for that game other games have it set to let the processor do alot more of the work and the vid card is just pushing the images out. To pinpoint one area of a system is tough to do since different games and applications use the system differently.
A good place to start is to make sure that you don't have too much running in your systray (next to the clock in the lower right side of your screen). the less that is there the more free resources you will have which directly effects your available RAM.
Another good idea is to give your system a reboot before starting up the game to that will clear any cached info that has reserved RAM space.
If you want more info just let me know |
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| po9rs4ch4e |
| I've only got 256 ddr ram, a 1.2 ghz processor but I'm runnin a nvidia geforce fx5200 128 card, that seems to be this systems only saving grace, maybe another stick of ram and some over-clocking? |
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| maxpayne126 |
id say some more ram, maybe a 256 or 512 stick; maybe a new processor and heatsink if u really want some speed (amd xp2600) should do great for your system.
im running 1gig of pc3200, xp2200+ @ 1.6ghz, and fx5200. works great for the new games, might have to turn off some of the performance features to get sweet frames (anitaliasing,etc) |
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| PraxRX7 |
1.2 GHz computer wont be making full use out of the GeForce5200. Your frontside bus will be to slow (motherboard, ram, etc).
The 5200 is almost close to the Geforce 3 top card.
The 5200 is about half the performance of the Geforce4 Ti4600.
I did a test on my computer with the following results in 3dmark01
GeForce4 Ti4600: 12830 3dmark01 points (my comp)
GeForce 5200 128: ~5400 3dmark01 points (my comp)
GeForce 5600XT 128: 6208 3dmark01 points (my comp)
GeForce GeForce3 ti200: 6048 3dmark01 points (Intel Pentium 4 1618 MHz)
The Geforce3 ti200 would probably max out at 7000-8000 on my pc.
Overclocking my computer's frontside bus I managed to get my score up to ~15500 before the system started to lose stability. The most anyone has squeezed out of a Geforce4 Ti4600 is 22008 points on a highly modified AMD machine and highly overclocked card. The best anyone with a comparable system has pulled off is 16038.
Also for your enjoyment current scores on new cards:
ATI X 800XT PE: 37747 (best numbers overall on the web)
GeForce 6800 Ultra: 34886 (again, best on the web)
These are tests run on P4 3.4 XT HT processors overclocked to 4.5+ GHz and a 325 MHz FSB (mine is 200) and they are only running 512 MB of RAM. They use a IC7/IC7-G(Intel i875P-ICH5) motherboard from abit. They only use 512 MB for efficiency purposes in testing. In a gaming environment such as Doom3 you computer wont complain if you have 1 GB of nice Corsair DDR400 pc3200 RAM.
I have a multitude of cards I have tested with...
For Doom3, this should be a good reference...
I run on High-Quality with the following computer.
P4 2.8 HT, DDR400 RAM, Geforce4 Ti4600
The framerates I experience are between 15-35 fps depending on how many guys are on the screen, I have seen spikes as low as 6 fps and high as 45 fps. On the highest graphics setting I dont see over 6 fps.
With your computer I wouldnt expect to run much higher than medium settings, and possibly even low.
Sorry, but Doom3 high quality requires pretty top of the line stuff.
But on my old P4 1.4 with DDR RAM and my GeForce4 Ti4600 my PC only scored 6913 on the 3dmarks. Just changing the processor, ram, and motherboard (higher speeds) doubled my score and performance.
256 RAM is pretty low, if you are running windows XP try to get a hold of 512 MB - 1 GB of ram (for extreme gaming) however, you might want to consider getting another PC instead of spending money on an older one.
Hope that brings things into perspective a bit...
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| scooby_dooby |
I would go with what Maxpayne said, you need a newer pocessor and a bit more ram, especially with windowsXP 256 barely cuts it,
i'd go with an athlon2600+ or something like that, they're only about $100 and it's pretty powerful. You might need a new MB as well though, they're about $100. A Stick of 256ram should run you about $70.
to answer your question about how to pinpoint bottlenecks, part of it is common sense and the other part is trial and error. By common sense I mean you look at your CPU usage, or ram usage, if they're nearing 100% then that's the component you probably want to look at. If they're both low, and you're still experiencing problems, you could start looking at the harddrive access speed, bus speeds or HD cache size, or graphics card... at that point it can be really difficult to pinpoint your current bottlenck.
Sometimes you can swap parts and then see if they had an effect on the systems performance, that's not really an option for most people though since most parts are non-refundable. But if you're lucky enough to work somewhere where parts can be "borrowed" temporarily then this is really the easiest way to test for a bottleneck. Just swap a new part in see what happens.
If I were you i'd try and borrow a stick of 256 of someone, then toss it in, then you can see if the new ram is worth the $70, or if it's the CPU that's really holding you back.
you might have a virus or 10 too, so a clean install might be worth a test, it's amazing how much faster the PC runs after a nice clean install. be careful about starting the new machine with internet plugged in though, firewall is disabled by default and you'll probably get a virus instantly as you connect to the internet, happens to me everytime. I have to unplug my modem until windows has started, then enable firewall, and then resotre the internet connection. |
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| PraxRX7 |
Yup, conclusion:
Get yourself a new Motherboard/Processor/Ram, Transfer your old stuff (Hard drive, cd-rom, floppy) over to the new motherboard...buy a new powersource (at least 350 W) and then go from there...your video card is alright for now...
With your current machine though, it doesnt matter what you do to it, it wont run Doom3 on high quality. |
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| ManHunter |
Doom3 doesn't respond well to overclocking. Especially overclocking the vid card.
PowerLeap might give you some ideas about what upgrades you can do to your computer.
MH |
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