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Gaming issue

F

FreshFish

Golden Member
Hey there,
I just bought a new system and I put UT2004 on it. The specs are:

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo
Athlon XP 2800+
Sapphire RADEON 9800 Pro
2 x 256MB Kinston Value RAM

I figured the game would run well on its "normal" graphic settings, but sometimes it gets a little bit laggy on me, even with the "lowest" graphic settings which baffles me. I am wondering if there is something I could do to boost performance a little bit. Also wondering what component of my new system the game isn't liking...it really seems to me like it should be running fine...I don't knwo what the prob. is...

thanks for any helping hints!
 
From reading a few post, I heard Value Ram isn't the best to use. This might be some of your problems, but I really don't know. =]
 
Most people who run UT2k4 agree that 1Gb of RAM for this game is a very good thing to have- 512Mb is okay, but you will get stuttering and so forth when the game needs to load new content. 1Gb smooths this out a lot. Also, make sure you have the latest nForce chipset drivers and ATI Catalyst drivers - those two things alone will help boost performance.

UT2k4 is a resource-hog, but it should run pretty well on your new system.

[Edit] Of course, you're not running FarCry, you're running UT2004 😱
 
It's the amount of ram. Today's FPS's actually do take up the full 512mb of RAM and then some. Same thing happens in Farcry for me. The textures are just too large to store in the main memory so there's a lot of HD swapping going on which really slows down the game. Upgrading to 1GB should give you a very nice boost in performance.

Errr..before you do that tho, go into your video settings and make sure AA and AF are disabled. If they're enabled, depending on the level they will cause a large performance decrease, especially given 512mb of ram.
 
Do you mean the vid. settings for the game or for the card? I can't find AA or AF options in the game itself but I saw them on the card settings. Is this what you meant? Yea, I am getting unreasonable amounts of stutters in the game right now...something is up, maybe soon I will go for another 512MB.

Thanks
 
Originally posted by: FreshFish
Do you mean the vid. settings for the game or for the card? I can't find AA or AF options in the game itself but I saw them on the card settings. Is this what you meant? Yea, I am getting unreasonable amounts of stutters in the game right now...something is up, maybe soon I will go for another 512MB.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I have a similar setup to yours, (p4 2.8c, 9800pro) but have 512 x 2 Corsair XMS 3200. And I run UT2k$ at max settings without even a hiccup at all (display of FPS hangs between 80 average to 200 average, depending on map).

Moral of the story: its your ram. Kingston makes some great ram, but if you are gaming, don't ever get value ram from anyone. It does make a difference.
 
I disagree with rcomo as far as the quality of "value ram". It's fine for your system. In all honesty, you won't notice much difference at all between a 512mb stick of corsair and a 512mb stick of kingston unless you're overclocking your system or want to have tight timings. rcomo, keep in mind that you have 1Gig of memory as opposed to fish's 512megs. I can almost guarantee you that it's the AMOUNT of ram and not the TYPE of ram. As far as the vid settings, I meant the settings for the vid card and not the game. Sometimes you might have AA and AF enabled in the drivers and not even know it. Check to make sure. Otherwise, just upgrade the ram. There's a hot deal going on at kingston where they're selling a 512mb stick of PC3200 for $60 AR ($75 before). It's a pretty damn good deal and a lot cheaper than you're going to find anywhere else. Just check out the hot deals forum.

:Edit: If you wanna check how much memory each game actually takes up, try ALT-TABing out of the game when running and check system usage. First time I checked Farcry usage, I was shocked to see that it took up >500 megs of memory all by itself which brought my total memory usage to ~700megs. And I only have a 512meg stick so that's why it was running like garbage. Good thing I ordered another one 🙂
 
ya, i think it's both the ram and the aa/af settings in ur vid card. these games now require a LOT of system resources, so 1gb will definitely make ur gameplay smoother. also, ur vid card is a huge verdict if u have aa/af enabled. that should do the job if u disable them. IMO, u'll need to upgrade to a gig of ram eventually, so u might as well do it now.
 
Do also go into your motherboard's BIOS and check these settings:
  • In the Advanced Chipset Features menu, set Memory Frequency to Sync or 100%, whichever appears there. This locks the memory's bus speed to the CPU's bus speed for low latency, which is desirable.
  • Set the Graphics Aperture Size to at least 256MB
  • You may want to try setting Video RAM Cacheable to Enabled to see what effect it may have, I'm not sure of its value
Aside from that, I assume you updated DirectX to 9.0b? And naturally your performance can be dragged down by background processes (antivirus scan, file-sharing software/traffic, etc). Also, if you have PCI cards, tell me what they are and I'll see if there is an optimal PCI-slot arrangement to suggest. 🙂 But I'll agree that you should get another 512MB of RAM in there if you can afford it.
 
Value Ram is fine when they are from a reputable source like Kingston or Crucial. As long as your not overclocking buy the value ram and with the money saved order a pizza 🙂
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
[*]You may want to try setting Video RAM Cacheable to Enabled to see what effect it may have, I'm not sure of its value[/list]
Click to expand...

Nope, definitely keep "Video RAM Cacheable" to Disabled... and that goes for everyone! It really only has any use in DOS and may even adversely affect Windows [NT/2000/XP/2003] performance. It's a holdover from the old days of ISA, 16-bit architecture, Windows 3.1, etc.
 
In your UT2K4 settings under Game, disable Speech Recognition and Preload all Skins. That will help.

Also, go get yourself O&O Clevercache Pro and tweak as follows. Thanks to Gonad The Barbarian for posting this info in so many threads - it made a night and day difference. :beer:

Advanced Tab
Absolute Maximum - 65470
Relative To Avail Memory - 20%
Check File Cache - 1000ms

Soooooo much smoother. 😀

- M4H
 
Ok, I think the general consensus is: get more RAM. This is what I plan to do now. Now my question is, I have the dual channel running right now, should I RMA it and buy Dual 512? OR should I just go for an extra stick of 512 in addition to what I have?? Also, and brand preferences or good deals out there? Thanks guys!

As far as AA and AF goes, my vid card is set to "Application Preference" and since there is no way to change it from within the game that I can find, I just assume it is defaulted as being off...

Also, I checked my system resources while in a game of UT2k4 like you said, Connoisseur, and it said I was using 518MB ha!! Go figure...I need more RAM...

thanks again!
 
You definately need another 512 stick of RAM.

I find when running UT2K4 i hit around ~750 MB of usage, sometimes more if i leave stuff running in the background. I have a similar setup to yours, but i have a 2500+ & 1024 MB of RAM.

As for dual channel?
Don't worry about it, as with AMD systems, the difference is marginal. If you can get the same type of stick, then go for it, but if not, it's nothing to get too worried about.
You can also manually change the AA & AF in your video settings if you check "use custom settings". Too much AA/AF with an already power-hungry game like UT will drop your fps a bit.
 
well, athlon xp's aren't huge bandwidth hogs so dual channel won't make a huge difference as far as performance goes (as opposed to a P4). So, to keep it simple you can just get a 512 stick, run it in single channel mode and call it a day. However, if you're willing to RMA you CAN get some of the money back from your 256 sticks and get 2x512's and run that in dual channel for the modest performance increase. In all honesty I'd just go for the 512 stick.
 
It's quite easy to do both. Just buy another 512MB stick of KVR, and move one of your 256MB sticks, so that both 256's are on one "channel", then put the 512MB stick in the other slot, and you now have 1024MB of dual-channel ram.😉
 
I was looking at a local store to buy my new 512 stick of KVR and I was wondering what CAS latency is. I came across a CL 2.5 and a CL 3 stick and I don't knwo which is right. Thanks
 
Either one will work. Lower CAS latency is better, other factors being equal, but the difference between 2.5 and 3.0 isn't something you'd discern without benchmarking.
 
Yeah ut2004, bfv, bf1942, all want atleast 1gb. Mostly because they load 1 model that has up to 5 level of details and textures 2-3 times larger then some games that have several mip map levels. Even if you have the texture quality turned all the way down its still loading the entire texture and then just switching to the lowest mip level. Not a very good system but it doesn't make you flush the texture cache when you want to tweak the texture settings which can be like loading the level over again.

I think theres a tweak somewhere in 2004 that forces everyone to your player skin/model. That should help on the ram shortage a lot as all those extra models and skins take up quite a bit of space.

Your slow downs are just the game pausing waiting for the hard drive to load up what the video card needs to draw the scene into ram.
 
I went ahead and bought the additional 512MB today. Now I have 1 gig so I figure it should run flawlessly, and for the most part it does. It's near perfect, but once in a while there's a twitch still. Could this be due to memory configuration ( I have dual 256's and one 512 stick now and I just put the 512 stick in the empty slot) or something else like that? I checked while in game and mem usage was in the upper 400's but nowhere near a gig. The gameplay is more than acceptable now, but I am striving for perfection 😀
 
Someone's irritable (i.e. M4H). Chill out dude, I don't know where to get that program you were talking about. I am assuming I must buy it. If so, there's why I didn't take your advice
 
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