6800gt and oblivion

[happyhungarian]

I'm not sure if this fits in here, might belong to the hardware subsection, apologies beforehand. I bought a used 6800gt agp (pny verto) and it doesn't seem to perform as expected. My friend has a system : amd 3000+ socket 939 1 gb ram msi 6600gt , obviously his card is pci-ex. My system is as follows:
p4 2.8 northwood asus p4v8x-x board (via chipset, ugh) 2 sticks of sticky yucky a-data 256 mb ram and one 512 mb kingston ram

I found this review : http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/oblivion_high-end_performance/default.asp
and the results seem to match with my card.
What's strange is my friend says the game runs perfectly smooth on his pc with high graphical settings, but with the same settings, my system performs very poorly, with low frame rates and occasional skips. The quality settings don't seem to change anything, with all settings maxed, the game performs pretty much the same.

The coolbits tweak doesn't seem to change anything, so much for all that hype...

Is it my cpu, my crappy old agp slot, or the gfx card that is underperforming?
Btw I'm a power user , so don't tell me to update my drivers, patch the game, or turn on my pc, and don't STFU NOOB me =)

Thanks in advance.

 

[DaveSimmons]

An A64 3000+ is roughly a P4 3.2 in games so he has an edge there.

Are you both running at the same resolution? 1280x1024 vs. 1024x768 makes a huge difference in the load on the video card.

 

[Atheus]

He has a faster processor, a much faster main bus speed (aren't you 533Mhz?), better memory at better timings, he's running dual channel and you're not, the newer 6800 may be faster or have more RAM than the old one... he might have a better hard drive too if his system is newer, SATA and NCQ, which helps with load times while outside in Oblivion land.

You might want to do a little upgrade - even if you don't have much to spend you can make a good job with what you have. Another 512 of RAM to match that Kingston would be a start, chuck the a-data, then you can run dual channel. Overclock the processor and bus speed a bit, maybe the memory too. You might need to buy a heatsink or power supply for this. Now the card is your bottleneck, but it can be overclocked too.

There are also many tweaks you can make to the oblivion.ini file.

 

[happyhungarian]

Right, but the performance hit seems too much, does it make that much of a difference?

 

[EarthwormJim]

It's probably your ram. I'd upgrade to atleast a 1.5 gigs.

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: happyhungarian
Right, but the performance hit seems too much, does it make that much of a difference?

Yes. Think of the bus speed alone - your friend has a 1GHz hypertransport bus which can carry twice as much data as yours.

 

[happyhungarian]

Yes, the bus speed is a drag, pff, it's too much hassle to upgrade everything, it costs too much and it pains me to know that i'll be doing it merely to play games =)

 

[happyhungarian]

Btw my bus speed is 800 mhz ...

 

[happyhungarian]

I'm suspecting maybe my psu can't cope with the load? I have a low quality 300 watts psu (generic brand, really lame), 3 sticks of ram, and a dvd+rw drive. I don't get any inconsistencies or resets, but i ran 3dmark 05 and got a score of 4500, and a lot of people with the same config seem to get at least 5000-5500. Is it possible that my psu is responsible for the underperformance?

 

[Dacalo]

Originally posted by: happyhungarian
I'm suspecting maybe my psu can't cope with the load? I have a low quality 300 watts psu (generic brand, really lame), 3 sticks of ram, and a dvd+rw drive. I don't get any inconsistencies or resets, but i ran 3dmark 05 and got a score of 4500, and a lot of people with the same config seem to get at least 5000-5500. Is it possible that my psu is responsible for the underperformance?

Nope.

 

[apoppin]

what are your settings?

Oblivion is a very demanding game and most players have to make some tweaks to get it to run outdoor scenes acceptably.

and make damn sure your self-shadows are OFF and your Grass DOWN if you want it to run better . . .
my x850xt/P4@3.2Ghz, 1GB RAM runs Oblivion very well at 11x8 with 4xAA+Bloom - everything maxed EXCEPT as above.

and there is a clue that your system may be underperforming if your 3DMark is off that much

 

[happyhungarian]

It's not just with oblivion, all other games seem to run poorly.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: happyhungarian
It's not just with oblivion, all other games seem to run poorly.

looks like you have 'issues' . . .

perhaps reinstall your os

 

[ojingoh]

i'll pile on -- your bus is laggy. b/c you have an odd number of sticks i'll assume you are not even running in dual channel, so your effective b/w is 266mhz. ouch.

i had a 6800gt agp running in a 3.06g p4 with 2 gigs of mem, it was BAD.

 

[happyhungarian]

Originally posted by: ojingoh
i'll pile on -- your bus is laggy. b/c you have an odd number of sticks i'll assume you are not even running in dual channel, so your effective b/w is 266mhz. ouch.

i had a 6800gt agp running in a 3.06g p4 with 2 gigs of mem, it was BAD.

Uh oh, so you suggest that i get rid of it? =)

 

[ojingoh]

lol no way! just get another stick of kingston ram, and put it in the slot. that is if your via chipset supports dual channel memory interface.

to be fair i was running the 6800 at 1920x1200, it was terrible. then i bumped it down to 1280x768, somewhat smoother, but not what i would call playable with all the eye candy etc on.

at the lower resolution your bus isn't haggard like it would be at large resolutions. the problem lies in the data that sits on your HD, it's a slow path into the agp card's texture. plus keep in mind your entire system -- HD to cpu to sound card to memory -- are all running slow. and i misspoke you are running half of 800mhz, so 400 mhz, which is not as bad as if you were running at 266mhz duh.

at any rate your proc ain't chokin your system, the bus is draggin you down. toss a 512mb stick of ram in it and have a go. or ditch the 2 256 sticks if you only have 3 slots, then run oblivion again.

 

[happyhungarian]

the stupid useless via chipset doesn't support the dual channel memory interface, nor does it support sata 2 > = (

I should better sell my system , and make do with my old laptop. The more i wait, the more it devalues. Pff, what a hassle. Anyway thanks to everyone.

 

[apoppin]

i wouldn't give up . . . obviously you are having problems with your system. A 6800gt even with your setup should run Oblivion at mid-details at 10x7 . . . [grass down and shadows off] . . . Q4 should be at 'hi' at 10x7.
[edited]

head over to Technical Support Forum . . . maybe reinstall that OS of yours and run some 3DMarkXX benchmarks . . . perhaps you will not need to spend any money [and RAM is really cheap now]

 

[lyssword]

more ram, one of weaknesses. Also ur cpu is slower. Because there are a lot of large textures, oblivion will benefit from extra ram memory..

 

[happyhungarian]

"obviously you are having problems with your system. A 6800gt even with your setup should run Oblivion at mid-details at 10x7"
it still skips frames and runs at 20 something fps when i drag the settings down to minimum, at 800x600 or 640x480!
right, that's my concern, i installed vtm: bloodlines, and the performance i got was exactly the same as the one i got from my crappy radeon 9200. I'll try reinstalling windows, but if the problem consists, i'm seriously intent on getting rid of this pc.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: happyhungarian
"obviously you are having problems with your system. A 6800gt even with your setup should run Oblivion at mid-details at 10x7"
it still skips frames and runs at 20 something fps when i drag the settings down to minimum, at 800x600 or 640x480!
right, that's my concern, i installed vtm: bloodlines, and the performance i got was exactly the same as the one i got from my crappy radeon 9200. I'll try reinstalling windows, but if the problem consists, i'm seriously intent on getting rid of this pc.

definitely reinstall windows. and make DAMN sure your MB drivers and everything else is patched and up-to-date!

i think i see your problem. Changing from ATi to nvidia videocards often carries big problems that require Driver Cleaners [at the least].

after that, you can look to o/c your system and 'fix' your RAM if you are still unhappy . . . but you should be TWICE as fast as with your old card.

btw, unpatched Bloodlines is buggy as hell

 

[secretanchitman]

my p4 2.4C @ 2.9Ghz with a 6600GT AGP and 2GB of ram ran oblivion fine at medium settings 1024x768. of course, this was in dungeons and i never really got to the outside so i dont know how that would fare. i did turn down many things...cause some options turned up look just the same turned down, IMO.

your processor is fine, and im thinking its maybe the ram or motherboard...are you sure that the mobo chipset (via in your case) is giving you the full 800fsb? or maybe you got slow ram that runs at ddr333 instead of ddr400...