Here's my rig:
2.8E Prescott.
MSI 875P Neo FIS2R MB
1 GB DDR-400
MSI FX5900XT 128VTD [128MB]
2x80GB SATA on intel soft RAID
This is over 2 years old. I got Half life 2 and ran it. By default everything was low. Resolution was 640x480. DirectX 8.1 was selected and DX9 wasn't even selectable. Setting higher settings caused hitches. I was sad. Sad and depressed. Just 2 years on a high end system is very low end. I found the FX series is crap as hell for HL2. Damn valve for siding with AMD. Damn DX9 for the 16FP issue or whatever.
My agp driver wasn't all too new[66.xx] and I'd never upgraded the vga BIOS afer purchase. I went to the MSI site, got liveupdate and upgraded the AGP BIOS. Then I got the 91.31 drivers from nVidia. I fired up HL2. Behold, the default settings chosen by the game:
Res: 1280x1024[LCD]
Model detail: High
AA: None [Still]
Texture: High
Water: Simple Reflections
Shadow: High
Filter: Trilinear [It didn't even run on trilinear before the upgrade]
Wait for VSync: Still disabled.
And DX9 was selected with DX8.1 disabled.
I changed AA to 2x and water to reflect all. Ran VERY smoothly. Played for 2 hours, no slowdown. Been doin' it since. Only once the pc hanged when exiting the game. Other than that, no issues.
To be fair, I disabled Norton autoprotect when playing after update. It was running bfore the update. But I doubt Norton would have such a HUGE impact.
I don't know if it was the BIOS flash or the 99.xx drivers. Whatever, they have done magic. My battle to hold out till Vista has renewed energy. I couldn't just upgrade the AGP as my next multi core Vista PC will surely be using PCIE. I guess now I can get that new LCD.
I'll look at Oblivion next to see if there are any improvements.
2.8E Prescott.
MSI 875P Neo FIS2R MB
1 GB DDR-400
MSI FX5900XT 128VTD [128MB]
2x80GB SATA on intel soft RAID
This is over 2 years old. I got Half life 2 and ran it. By default everything was low. Resolution was 640x480. DirectX 8.1 was selected and DX9 wasn't even selectable. Setting higher settings caused hitches. I was sad. Sad and depressed. Just 2 years on a high end system is very low end. I found the FX series is crap as hell for HL2. Damn valve for siding with AMD. Damn DX9 for the 16FP issue or whatever.
My agp driver wasn't all too new[66.xx] and I'd never upgraded the vga BIOS afer purchase. I went to the MSI site, got liveupdate and upgraded the AGP BIOS. Then I got the 91.31 drivers from nVidia. I fired up HL2. Behold, the default settings chosen by the game:
Res: 1280x1024[LCD]
Model detail: High
AA: None [Still]
Texture: High
Water: Simple Reflections
Shadow: High
Filter: Trilinear [It didn't even run on trilinear before the upgrade]
Wait for VSync: Still disabled.
And DX9 was selected with DX8.1 disabled.
I changed AA to 2x and water to reflect all. Ran VERY smoothly. Played for 2 hours, no slowdown. Been doin' it since. Only once the pc hanged when exiting the game. Other than that, no issues.
To be fair, I disabled Norton autoprotect when playing after update. It was running bfore the update. But I doubt Norton would have such a HUGE impact.
I don't know if it was the BIOS flash or the 99.xx drivers. Whatever, they have done magic. My battle to hold out till Vista has renewed energy. I couldn't just upgrade the AGP as my next multi core Vista PC will surely be using PCIE. I guess now I can get that new LCD.
I'll look at Oblivion next to see if there are any improvements.
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