Too much hard drive activity with HL2 or Doom 3

[lobotiger]

Ok guys I need some advice for my computer which is running crappy while playing games of Doom 3 or Half Life 2.

I just got a Geforce 6600 GT AGP yesterday (upgrading from a Geforce FX5700) and I thought that game play would be significantly better in these two games. After installing the card and drivers and launching either of the games I find that the performance almost seems to be worst. The hard drive is constantly thrashing which makes gameplay frustrating as hell. I even lowered the resolutions and settings to the same that the FX5700 had but it seems like it's still the same thing.

Anyone know what's going? Why would upgrading the card decrease the performance so significantly? Will me getting more memory or a faster hard drive help me here? Here are my specs to give you an idea of what I'm running:

Abit NF7-S v2.0
Athlon Mobile XP 2500+ o/c to 2.3Ghz (11.5x200FSB)
OCZ EL Platinum PC3200 (2x256M)
BFG 6600GT OC 128MB AGP <-- latest drivers from Nvida (66.93)
WD ATA100 7200rpm 120G
Sony CD-RW
Creative 56x CD-ROM

Thanks for any advice.

Lobo

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

1GB of ram for HL2 and Doom3 really helped my performance issues during loading

Are you sure you completely uninstalled your old video card before you put in the new one though?

 

[fishmonger12]

not enough ram. your hard drive's swap is being used.

 

[intogamer]

Originally posted by: fishmonger12
not enough ram. your hard drive's swap is being used.

Would be interested of your old 5700.

 

[fishmonger12]

Originally posted by: intogamer

Originally posted by: fishmonger12
not enough ram. your hard drive's swap is being used.

Would be interested of your old 5700.

huh?

 

[lobotiger]

Thanks everyone. Looks like memory is my issue. I managed to free up 100MB of memory on my system by closing off apps that weren't absolutely necessary to run. Freeing this much up managed to give me a smoother gameplay in HL2. Looks like I need to start considering 1GB of RAM for my rig. The wife is gonna love that one!

Oh and just to answer a couple of questions, yes I did remove the old drivers entirely and no I won't be able to off my old FX5200 since I'm using it in another system now.

Thanks.

LoboTiger

 

[Appledrop]

hi yes when you can afford it, 1gb is a lot nicer than 512 really... i stuttered in hl2 and far cry with 512 :/

 

[Gentle]

With Half-Life 2, if you have less than 768 meg of ram, selecting Texture Detail: High will usually result in long load times and excessive swap file use.

Gentle