ASRock Dual VSTA 775 + ASUS 7900GT = No performance increase

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  • #16539
    XDCNeonSamurai
    Participant

    Last week a member of XDC kindly sold me a new PCI-E GFX card (7900GT) since my PC hasn’t been able to play 2142 at anywhere near a decent frame rate. Obviously I don’t want to embarrass the generous chap who sold me the card, but I’ll refer to him as S Brown.

    Anyway Steve sent me this card and I eagerly put it in my machine, downloaded the drivers for it and installed them. Reinstalled Direct X and also 2142, but there’s no obvious performance increase (on 2142 of BF2 anyways). I’m still getting a jumpy frame rate even at 1024×768 that seems no different from my old AGP card (the mobo accepts both).

    I’m going to download 3DMark’06 to check it out tonight, but something seems a little fishy to me (not with the card, which is tip top) but with my system or EA games. Could my mobo be bottlenecking the 3D data? I’ve only scratched the surface of experimenting with the system to try and find a solution, but does anyone have any ideas what I could try?

    I’m running an ASRock Dual VSTA, with a Pentium D820, with an ASUS 7900GT, 1GB of Corsair DDR 400 memory, on XP SP2.

    Cheers

    Neon

    #52602
    XDC Erratic-Space
    Participant

    Mate with everything I’ve tried for 2142 I’m putting more down to my net connection than anything else. I’ve played it on full settings running like a dream. And I’ve played it on low chugging like a…well you get the idea.

    I’m resigned to only getting a decent connection early hours of the day, evenings is a nightmare. But I hope u sort it out.

    I was in shock at the wkd when I popped on and it was empty.

    #52603
    Lensman
    Participant

    I recently upgraded my card too, but still get crap frame rates. When moving it feels like running through treacle. The picture looks prettier – I have turned on more effects and run at a higher res which is fine. But when I turn all these off again, I get no measureable difference.

    However, my 3D Mark ’03 jumped from 5150 to 10802. My old card could not run ’06 without crashing, and my new one gets 2220.

    My gut feeling is that something is going on with the latest patch, as that was coincident(ish) with my upgrade. Obviously does not affect everyone, but maybe there’s a combination of things going on.

    I’ve hardly played in a couple of months now, but I was thinking about trying to run a standalone game and see if that behaves the same. That will rule out any network/PB nonsense.

    #52604
    XDCiNSANE
    Participant

    fuck the game… its nothing but trouble.. TROUBLE I TELLS YA!!

    Every day has at least one post regarding issues with this game.. mind you I’m starting to read that more than recent drivell hehe

    BIN IT!!!

    #52605
    dodge
    Participant

    Don’t know if this is anything to do with it but PB is now running two processes on your system. This has caused a lot of problems for people one of which is lag.

    #52606
    XDCNeonSamurai
    Participant

    Actually I thought it might be a lag/connection issue, but the problems persist with single player. It looks prettier, but still the same jerky frame rate and the running in treacle feeling. I remember Signal said he had similar problems, and he’s got a 8800! Basically the screen will be fine, but it almost seem to skip a frame or two every second. Driving an FAV is almost impossible.

    Like Lensman, I upgraded my system just before the penultimate patch so I can’t work out if it’s the patch or my system. But I get a very similar level of performance with BF2 and 2142, so it might be something to do with the game engine.

    I’ve heard similar stories about dual processors causing lag problems, but it seems only on Vista (I’m XP) although I don’t seem to be able to disable the spare core to try it out. As the problem occured with my AGP and PCI-E it would certainly be a common denominator between the two.

    I think I’ll try installing the game from scratch and not adding any of the patches and then see how it performs.

    And as for Insane’s comments: Well I did try, but my knob wouldn’t fit through the hole in the middle of the DVD, so I just had a wank.

    #52607
    XDCMADMAX
    Participant

    Dont understand that mate, bf2142bf2 ran fine with that card, I only upg. because I wanted a better card for COH, odd the game has not improved for you.

    I would suggest increasing your memory mate, to atleast 2gb.

    #52608
    XDCiNSANE
    Participant

    because I wanted a better card for COH,

    lol you turd.. that 7900 would run COH no issues!

    #52609
    XDCMADMAX
    Participant

    and other stuff too, not just COH.

    #52610
    Anonymous
    Participant

    First lesson you have learned is Asrock suck. Every machine I have been called to fix which had an asrock board in had failed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of such a low quality component linking all your nify bits together would be the progmlem, but EA’s bugs and problems with their inability to code won’t be helping much either.

    #52611
    XDCNeonSamurai
    Participant

    Extra memory is the next thing on my shopping list, but I can’t see where that money’s coming from at the moment (oh the joys of marriage 😉 ). 2GB seems to be the minimum requirements for the latest gen BF games to run smoothly, although I never had a problem with my old ASUS board with 1GB.

    ASRock aren’t exactly the Ferrari of mobo manufacturers, but I wouldn’t have thought it would effect the gameplay this much. Sure, they might be more likely to go pop, but from what I’ve read on this board it’s fairly stable and middle of the road performance wise.I think the main culprit might be our friends at EA, but I’ll see what I can work out tonight.

    Maybe I’ll just go old-school and install Operation Flashpoint…

    Cheers for the advice so far fellas…

    #52612
    11thSignal
    Participant

    Well in reply to Neon, I have finally got my 8800 working ok in Bf2142, now before we start this problem I had was only with BF2142, everything else runs at top whack with my new gfx card, My solution was the new Nvidia drivers(beta) and a copy of Riva tuner and a bit of tinkering.

    It seems to me that with my 7800(from Darthtater) and my 8800 in Bf2142 there’s been absoulutley no increase in performace albeit every other game flys with the new card. I have just stuck with 1024*768 with no AA and everything else stuck to max.

    With BF2142 the Rivatuner program “REALLY” helped in regards to Bf2142 if not in performance definately in supposed lag and stability issues, The lag is now stable and my ping is hovering around 17-19 before that it was fluctuating between 45-90, weird but that has now gone since tinkering with the card and riva. Hope this helps Neon.

    #52613
    Wipers
    Participant

    A dodgy BIOS setting maybe? Upgrade to latest BIOS and set bios to factory defaults? I agree the RAM isn’t a major issue here. Try using a different video resolution if you can (drop to 800 x 600) to rule out the graphics side of things?

    #52614
    XDC-snell
    Participant

    Bit more Ram, wou;d do the system no harm, Overclocker has gail 2GB for £67

    #52615
    XDCNeonSamurai
    Participant

    Well, I’ve done some investimigation and have come to the conclussion that EA are at fault (or at least are the main culprits). Basically my board was a stop-gap so I could do a slow transition from AGP + DDR, to PCI-E and DDR2, which it seems to be doing admirably, with the exception of the latest BF series. I will be getting 2GB of DDR2 sometime in the future though, but I don’t think that’d solve this particular problem.

    Even without patches installed 2142 clunks along on low settings, and even when it’s ramped up to 1280×1024 with everything on ‘high’ I get virtually the same jerky framerate (but a much prettier picture). Conversely Far Cry runs smoothly and beautifully at the same res and equally high setting (which it couldn’t handle before).

    Having a VIA chipset on the mobo certainly doesn’t help but my beast can handle everything else at high res no problem.

    Although I’ve not updated my BIOS, it is an option. I have however set it to default and tried it like that, although I’ve since reconfigured it the way I likes it, but no joy on the BF front. I’m sure that there’s more tweaking I can do with the OS that may effect it, but that’s for another time.

    So I guess I’ll just have to wait until the next big team game hits XDC and go with that. Quake Wars: Enemy Territory anyone?

    Muchos thanks for the help and advice though fellows, I owe you all a pint.*

    *Pint – singular – to be shared buy all correspondents on this post.

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