The world's most bizarre PC problem

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: tokyo jesus fist

Originally posted by: Smilin
Doom 3 would definately dip in the 30s on that hardware. You get into a good fight and you might see 25 for a brief blip.

30-40 fps in halflife 2 isn't unheard of either. It kindof depend where you are standing at what you are looking at.

Well Jesus, what kind of hardware do I need to run games these days? An IBM supercomputer?

If you are expecting pegged 100fps out of halflife 2, then yes an IBM supercomputer might be a good place to start. Otherwise 40fps for state of the art graphics should be expected.

If this all sounds odd to you, I don't think you have a healthy respect for just what these games are asking of your hardware. Both HL2 and D3 were designed to run at maxed out settings on hardware that doesn't exist yet.

btw, HL 2 does have a well documented "stuttering" issue at certain load points in the game.

Everyone else reports perfectly fine and stable frame rates, even people with computers less powerful than mine. Furthermore, if I reduce the image quality to the absolute minimum (using HL2's menu and console settings and ATI's control panel), the framerates don't change at all. It's not a normal performance issue that I'm experiencing.

It's beginning to sound like your expectations of "fine and stable" may be out of whack. If you reduce image quality and your framerate does not drop then you were at a bottleneck to begin with. However, the good news is you are already looking at "worst case". Go the other direction...crank UP the image quality and resolution. I'm betting that with your hardware you'll get up to phenomenal image quality and resolution yet still have playable framerates. Will it be 100fps? No. It's going to be a "playable" 30-50fps but it is going to look GOOOOD. Try everything cranked, 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 16AF. I bet your framerate will be quite acceptable.

Originally posted by: Phil
Yup.

Athlon 2600+, gig o' RAM and a 9600 Pro here, and HL2 runs at 1024x768@32-bit at around 45fps with details to Medium.

OP, what detail level are you running Half-Life 2 with? Try Medium and see what framerates you get.

Also, post your 3DMark 2003/2005 score.

I think 3DMark is a joke. No matter what kind of crappy framerates I get, it still gives me a good score.

[/quote]
3DMark 2003 is no longer a viable test of your hardware. It will probably only give you a score slightly better than top of the line 2003 hardware.

I think you may be looking at performance the wrong way. Your hardware is only going to be slightly faster than hardware a few years back. It's the capabilities of it that are going to really shine. You should be getting DX9 effects like heat-distortions in Doom3 with no performance impact. The pixel fill rate of your video card isn't that much higher than recent hardware I'm sure, but what makes it really worth the cost is the fact it can do complex pixel and vertex shader programs that cards a few years ago would have chugged at 2-5fps if they tried to do.

Go for image quality and you'll get acceptable framerate on modern games. Go for absolute maximum framerate and you'll be disappointed. If you're truly worried your hardware is choking, bust out Quake 3 arena and I bet you'll stay over 200fps for a whole level. If you drop below 80 for even a second then something is badly wrong.

 

[tokyo jesus fist]

Originally posted by: Smilin
3DMark 2003 is no longer a viable test of your hardware. It will probably only give you a score slightly better than top of the line 2003 hardware.

No, it actually gives me really bad framerates.

I think you may be looking at performance the wrong way. Your hardware is only going to be slightly faster than hardware a few years back. It's the capabilities of it that are going to really shine. You should be getting DX9 effects like heat-distortions in Doom3 with no performance impact. The pixel fill rate of your video card isn't that much higher than recent hardware I'm sure, but what makes it really worth the cost is the fact it can do complex pixel and vertex shader programs that cards a few years ago would have chugged at 2-5fps if they tried to do.

Go for image quality and you'll get acceptable framerate on modern games. Go for absolute maximum framerate and you'll be disappointed. If you're truly worried your hardware is choking, bust out Quake 3 arena and I bet you'll stay over 200fps for a whole level. If you drop below 80 for even a second then something is badly wrong.

I repeat: lowering all settings to the absolute minimum has absolutely no impact on framerates. It doesn't matter if the game looks like Unreal 3 or Wolfenstein 3D, framerates are just the same.

Everyone else is getting perfectly fine framerates.

 

[tokyo jesus fist]

One last bump, just for the hell of it.