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Nvidia 6600GT AGP card running Battlefield 2

AMCRambler

AMCRambler

Diamond Member
Been running BF2 on my 6600GT AGP card for a while now. My friend just recently starting playing BF2 and he's got a 6600GT running on a PCI-E interface and running on the same settings as mine, his frame rates are noticeably higher. I realize it's due to the PCI-E that his is running smoother, but I'm wondering if I would be able to get some benefit from upgrading to a 6800 or a 7800. Trying to weigh whether I should upgrade the card, or upgrade the motherboard and card. Obviously the bigger benefit would be both the card and the motherboard but of course that will cost a lot more.
I guess what it comes down to is, how much frame rate improvement do you get going from a 6600GT AGP card to a 6800 or 7800 AGP card. Been looking at benchmarks, but I haven't found any that really compare the 6600GT with the new crop of cards. Any ideas?
 
If you have a s939 CPU. You could've upgraded to a 7800GT that came with a free mobo. I don't thinkt he deal is still around, but wait for it. It was $354.
 
Resolution makes a huge difference -- are you running at the same quality settings and the same resolution?

Dropping down to a lower resolution is the free solution, otherwise a 6800GS AGP is reasonable now ($175-85 at newegg). Check the video tab at the main AT site, TomsHardware, HardOCP, etc. for benches.
 
What's his rig? That's probably the main difference, not the video card. BF2 is pretty ram intensive, esp. when there's a lot going on onscreen. Your PC2700 ram might have something to do with it. Are you running in dual channel? Is there any way you can add more ram?

Just an idea.

-z
 
Originally posted by: zagood
What's his rig? That's probably the main difference, not the video card. BF2 is pretty ram intensive, esp. when there's a lot going on onscreen. Your PC2700 ram might have something to do with it. Are you running in dual channel? Is there any way you can add more ram?

Just an idea.

-z
Click to expand...

I did recently upgrade my memory and I'm running 2gb's(gotta update my rig profile). He does have a beefier pc than me. He's running an Athlon 64 with 2gb's in dual channel config. My impression of the ram upgrade was that it really didn't improve my frame rates any. Load time more than halved though! It could be he's got the faster memory speed or cpu, but I'm thinking frame rates almost always are directly tied to the vid card.
As far as resolution goes, I'm not running anything really outrageous. Just 1024x768. I think I might try dropping it to 800x600 just to see what it looks like(good thought dave!). I've got a 2000fpw though for a screen, so it might look pretty bleh. If not I'll probably just suck it up and deal with it. It doesn't really get that bad or noticeable until I get a helicopter or a bunch of guys having a fire fight on the screen with artillery screaming in. For the most part it runs pretty darn good.
I'll go look through Tom's and Anandtech vid sections, but I've already hit those without finding a review on AGP cards that includes the 6600GT and all the latest. Haven't tried HardOCP yet though, will check there too. Thanks guys.
 
if the cpu and ram are the same, including the hd types, then the agp and the pci-e would have almost no difference in performance when it comes to the 6600GT, regardless of 8x/16x bus speeds.

check the software environment in the background, your foreground program should have first priority

resolution, quality settings with 3D and sound play the hugest factors. you can tweak out the video card settings in the nVidia 3D graphics card control panel for possibly better performance.
 
Originally posted by: fire400
if the cpu and ram are the same, including the hd types, then the agp and the pci-e would have almost no difference in performance when it comes to the 6600GT, regardless of 8x/16x bus speeds.

check the software environment in the background, your foreground program should have first priority

resolution, quality settings with 3D and sound play the hugest factors. you can tweak out the video card settings in the nVidia 3D graphics card control panel for possibly better performance.
Click to expand...

When you say check the software enviro in the background to make sure my foreground prog has priority, can you expand on that a little? I'm running XP and I thought that default behavior was for the foreground, or fullscreen program to have priority. Didn't think you coudl configure that on XP. I think I read Vista lets you modify priority settings, but I'd have no idea where to find that in XP. Is it possible to change them and if so where do I look?
I am going to tweak with the graphics settings a bit to see if I can get a few more frames without dropping the quality. Maybe even a little mild overclocking. Are you sure the bus speed difference isn't going to make a big difference between the PCI-E and the AGP?
 
Originally posted by: ciproxr
if i were u i would wait fot directx 10 cards, u can get around with a 6600gt.
Click to expand...

Good point. Vista is coming out soon, and with it I'm sure we'll see a flood of Direct X 10 enabled versions of the cards we're all drooling over now. The question is, how long till the prices come down to reasonable levels! I don't know about you guys, but dropping more than $200 bucks on one video card is just a little nuts. All these guys running 7800GT's in SLI just crack me up.
 
I have a radeon x800 and i get an average of 70 fps on 1024 by 768 on medium........ur 6600gt should give out the same performance , possibly more
 
laugh on bud, thats why you get torn a new one in BF2. if you had bought a good vid card in the first place, you wouldnt have needed to post this thread.
 
Originally posted by: AMCRambler
Originally posted by: ciproxr
if i were u i would wait fot directx 10 cards, u can get around with a 6600gt.
Click to expand...

Good point. Vista is coming out soon, and with it I'm sure we'll see a flood of Direct X 10 enabled versions of the cards we're all drooling over now. The question is, how long till the prices come down to reasonable levels! I don't know about you guys, but dropping more than $200 bucks on one video card is just a little nuts. All these guys running 7800GT's in SLI just crack me up.
Click to expand...


*looks at sig*😕

then i must be hilarious
 
Originally posted by: LiquidImpulse
Originally posted by: AMCRambler
Originally posted by: ciproxr
if i were u i would wait fot directx 10 cards, u can get around with a 6600gt.
Click to expand...

Good point. Vista is coming out soon, and with it I'm sure we'll see a flood of Direct X 10 enabled versions of the cards we're all drooling over now. The question is, how long till the prices come down to reasonable levels! I don't know about you guys, but dropping more than $200 bucks on one video card is just a little nuts. All these guys running 7800GT's in SLI just crack me up.
Click to expand...


*looks at sig*😕

then i must be hilarious
Click to expand...

Hillarious if you've got to upgrade those two 7800GT's in 8 months to run Vista.
 
Did some messing around last night with the settings. Tried turning off AA and putting the settings to what my friend has his set at. Not much improvement in the framerates though. With AA on or off it doesn't seem to affect the framerate much at all, so I put it back to 4x because it does noticeably improve the graphics. The one thing I did change was the refresh rate. Seems to look a lot smoother at 1024x768 @ 60hz than it did at same res but 75hz. I also tried everything on medium, AA off and 800x600 res and not only did it look horrible, but it actually ran choppier. Not sure why that was.
Anyways it looks like I'm gonna stick it out for a while with this card, then do a board upgrade and at that point get a PCI-E card. I might upgrade to the 7800 if they get down cheap enough before then. Thanks for all the input.
 
Did some more tweaking with my card and I'm actually running overclocked now. The card handles it with no problems. In the process of troubleshooting this I did find that my board only handles AGP 4x! Could I have found my bottleneck? I've been searching info on 8x vs 4x and everything I could find sais there is really a negligible difference running either one. I have trouble believing this though. I'm thinking about upgrading my board on the cheap to an 8x AGP capable one. I can probably get one compatible with my cpu and memory for $50 or cheaper used. I'm thinking if I can get a 20fps jump in framerate for that much money it would be worth it. So do you guys think my problem could be the 4x AGP bus?
 
> I have trouble believing this though.

Why? do you think SATA-3Gb drives are twice as fast as SATA-1 too? (Hint: no they aren't)

Extra bandwidth only helps when bandwidth is the bottleneck. Read about AM2 and how switching to DDR2 offers almost no improvement becuase the extra bandwidth isn't needed yet. Compare performance of same-family IDE and SATA 3Gb drives and see how the 3x bandwidth makes almost no real-world difference.
 
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
> I have trouble believing this though.

Why? do you think SATA-3Gb drives are twice as fast as SATA-1 too? (Hint: no they aren't)

Extra bandwidth only helps when bandwidth is the bottleneck. Read about AM2 and how switching to DDR2 offers almost no improvement becuase the extra bandwidth isn't needed yet. Compare performance of same-family IDE and SATA 3Gb drives and see how the 3x bandwidth makes almost no real-world difference.
Click to expand...

Yes I understand that opening up the bottleneck in a system will produce the biggest performance increase. But if AGP 4x was never a bottleneck, why would all these companies spend the money to develop 8x architecture? Or PCI-E even for that matter? If graphics cards are not being held back by bus speed, what is the limiting factor? Is it basically memory and gpu speed? I think that there is a decent performance increase to be found between 4x, 8x agp and PCI-E. Seems that the jump from 4x to 8x only yields a 5-10% performance increase according to Tom's hardware though.
 
agp is not a bottleneck. the reviews i've seen have the agp performing the same as the pcie. ihave a 6600gt agp so i looked into it a while back. agp 8x and such was for streaming textures from main memory, its irrelevant since thats only for sh*t onboard video that runs so slow its truely irrelevant. the rest of your system does matter, and perhaps your install of windows is messed up or you have apps running in the background.

as for 2gb, it does help, there are probablyplenty of posts on it in this forum. forget which site but they did benchmarks that did show an improvement with 2gb over 1gb. once the textures are cached the average frame rate is better, so if you play for a while it will bea better experience. it was posted in one of those threads😛
 
What are your audio settings at in BF2? I noticed your using onboard sound. I was using OB for awhile and when I jacked my audio settings up to even Medium, it dropped my framerates a ton.
 
Sounds like you got a bunch of junk running in the background. I run a 7800gt pcie with all settings at max and only a gig of corsair and only get mild vid lag once and a while. I know that mem will cure this so I aint real worried about it.

In order to play the game like this I have to close a few processes like defwatch,Lightscribe service, vp tray, Printer crap. With all these running I could see a noticable hit in game play performance.
 
The answer to this should be pretty simple from what i'm reading u both have the same amount of ram and same Graphics card. And using the same settings therefor Athlon 64 > Athlon XP.
 
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