Having problems w/ Radeon 9800 Pro fps

[UnrealAddict]

My system is a 1700+ XP, 512 mb DDR (266), Soyo Dragon Plus (I think), only AGP 4x. I just bought a Radeon 9800 Pro. On UT2003, it seems pretty smooth with everything turned on in the game, but I can see the fps drop down to 17 when playing in Invasion mode. I have it cranked up to 1280x1024. Now, I don't have the same setup as these web testers, but come on, my machine's pretty decent. I was unsure whether I had that much of an improvement over my old card so I started up Return to Castle Wolfenstein. My old card - GF3 Ti200 got around 70-90 fps at 1280x1024 with decent settings turned on. With the Radeon 9800 pro, I am getting 30-40fps. I played around with the settings, but it always stay at the same fps. I do have catalyst 3.2. I only got the card because my GF3 was sometimes really dragging on UT2003 at 1024x768 and medium settings

Now, if I am going to buy a $400 card, I want to see it wallup my old, pretty good card. I an't seeing that. I'm miffed! Thinking about returning it. What's up? Anybody got a clue? I'll give the card this, I saw a difference in picture quality immediately -- 2D and 3D. Much sharper, crisper. But for $400 I'd better have a sharp, crisp picture that will meet the challenge of any game for the next 2 years.

 

[YoungChowFun]

Drivers. Old drivers. Try reformatting or get one of them 'driver clean up' software for the comp. Old drivers left behind from old Nvidia drivers may be your problem. It is somewhat of a common problem now.

 

[gururu]

make sure vsync is off. that'll keep you around 30-40 fps if on.
drop AA and use quality AF. that'll pick up your lower fps end.
Its worth the extra 5-10 fps.

 

[kylebisme]

vsync will not keep your framerate any lower than your refesh rate, and it that is 30 or 40hz then you have more troubles than i would wish on anyone. vsync will on the other hand keep your frames in sync which is rather handy for nice solid image quality, however you should trun it off for benchmarking. oh and my 9700pro runs rtcw like a champ with full aa and af at 1024x768 locked at 85fps, when i had a slower processor it would drop some but still it was plenty more than my old gf3 could ever dream of doing so you are bound to have some confuration issues holding you back.

 

[UnrealAddict]

I know of a free software from MS that cleans out the registry of stuff put in by installation programs. I'll try that. What other software do you recommend?

This is such a bitter experience. I want to point blame at some company and cast them out of my future purchases but don't know which one. If it isn't old drivers, I suspect VIA. Via chipset gave me so many problems when I stepped out of the Intel world. Now it's stable, but I don't trust it. Next machine definitely Intel-based with Intel chipset. Don't got time to waste looking for drivers and researching problems.

 

[kylebisme]

i have been useing via/amd setups exclusevly sense my 486 and have not had a lick of trouble aside from the 686a south bridge which was somewhat anoying but nothing that caused me too much greif. it is probably old drivers still in it if you did not uninstall them prior to pulling the geforce, however i really do not know of what software to use to clean it out. you can always just seach the reg for "nvidia" and "nv" and deleate every instance, i had to do that once myself and it turned out just fine.

 

[eastvillager]

Make sure TruForm is forced off in the ati driver config. Fastwrites can cause problems as well, do a trial run with fastwrites disabled too.

 

[Budmantom]

Did you try benchmarking the card with 3dmark2001se and 2003?

 

[UnrealAddict]

How do you turn off TruForm? Don't see an option. I'm using Catalyst 3.2.

 

[UnrealAddict]

No, I didn't test in any other benchmarks other than RTCW and UT2003. I used these because my GF3 gave me a reference on how an older generation card would perform.

I cleaned my system with Norton System Works today. Still, slow as hell on RTCW. That doesn't bother me much since I don't play that game anymore, but UT2003 suffering too? What happens when Doom3 and Half-Life 2 comes out? Graphics is becoming what CPU used to be, a never ending need to upgrade.

 

[YoungChowFun]

Do you have any kind of Norton program or anti-virus program running while you're running your games? If you do, then disable them and try running games. I know it's not your card, that's one hell of a card. It has to be software related.

 

[Potatopopper]

I think I might know what is wrong with your graphics card. Are you using onboard audio? I had a problem with my radeon 9800 pro when I got it while using onboard audio in my A7N8X deluxe. I got the same low frame rate in my games because of it. Except RTCW didn't run at 30-40 frames, but you can try disabling your onboard sound if that is what your using and see what it does to your frame rates.

 

[KillaBong]

Reformat?

 

[Mem]

Driver Cleaner 1.8 is worth trying then install the latest CAT 3.5s.

 

[Viper96720]

What are your driver settings for D3D and OpenGL. Try the balanced setting see what you get. Then increase the aa and af see what happens. Truform setting is at the bottom
always off or application preference.

 

[Snufalufagus]

Your CPU is a little slow and you need more memory. If you got another stick of 256 it should help out quit a bit. Unreal is a CPU intensive game and a memory hog.