thinking of an upgrade....what makes the most sense?

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:30 pm

Looking for advice from the OO hive mind,

I'm thinking of upgrading the computer. HL2 just kills it. My system specs:

CPU: P4 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 1 GB 3200
Video: Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB
Disk: 7200 RPM SATA (no raid at this time)
Sound: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

Any help would be appreciated. I wish I could tell exactly what the bottleneck was in HL2. I only get reasonable performance when I drop the resolution down to 1024x768 and Medium textures. The problem is I have a 1600x1200 LCD and scaling that 1024x768 to that res just sucks. Note that I also don't run with AA or AF.

- shaggy

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:56 pm

That CPU upgrade is such a tiny percentage of increase that it wouldn't be much of an improvement. The RAM, already at 1 GB, would be plain overkill.

Upgrade the vid card. The older card, plus the lesser memory, are your bottleneck.

I also have 1GB PC3200 RAM, I have a lesser processor, and was able to run HL2 at 1600x1200 without a hitch - the only significant thing different about my system is the video card (a 6800 GT)

EvilHomer3k · Post by **EvilHomer3k** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:06 pm

I voted other but then reread your post. I'd vote for the 6800 GT or even the 6600 GT. The 6600 GT will give you playable framerates at 1600x1200 (no AA or AF) and will cost about half of the 6800 GT. If you want to add AA or AF or get above 60fps, I'd vote for the 6800 GT. It gets better framerates in Doom 3 and is about even with the X800 in HL2. For the money, the 6600 GT will get you what you want but you'd need to upgrade sooner.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2278&p=13

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:14 pm

Blackhawk wrote:That CPU upgrade is such a tiny percentage of increase that it wouldn't be much of an improvement. The RAM, already at 1 GB, would be plain overkill.

Upgrade the vid card. The older card, plus the lesser memory, are your bottleneck.

I also have 1GB PC3200 RAM, I have a lesser processor, and was able to run HL2 at 1600x1200 without a hitch - the only significant thing different about my system is the video card (a 6800 GT)

Curious, what are your advanced settings on the video tab?

- shaggy

Eightball · Post by **Eightball** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:22 pm

I have a 6800 GT in my new rig, and my computer basically laughed at HL2. Since the rest of your rig is decent, I'd imagine that you'd get the most out of a GPU upgrade.

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:36 pm

EvilHomer3k wrote:I voted other but then reread your post. I'd vote for the 6800 GT or even the 6600 GT. The 6600 GT will give you playable framerates at 1600x1200 (no AA or AF) and will cost about half of the 6800 GT. If you want to add AA or AF or get above 60fps, I'd vote for the 6800 GT. It gets better framerates in Doom 3 and is about even with the X800 in HL2. For the money, the 6600 GT will get you what you want but you'd need to upgrade sooner.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2278&p=13

Cool link. Researching further on the 6600 GT to keep costs down.

- shaggy

disarm · Post by **disarm** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:55 pm

your current system should run HL2 fine...not sure why you're having so much trouble. i have a P4-3.0gHz, 9800 Pro, 1GB RAM and was able to play through the whole game perfectly at 1280x1024 with mid-level AA and AF. if HL2 is running that poorly for you, you might want to look into something else that's slowing your system down...

if you decide to upgrade anyway, i'd go with a better video card...any difference from a new cpu would be pretty minimal compared to that, and everything in your rig is pretty good. you would get better audio effects in some games with an Audigy2-ZS at some point, but that's not really a performance issue.

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 10:10 pm

disarm wrote:your current system should run HL2 fine...not sure why you're having so much trouble. i have a P4-3.0gHz, 9800 Pro, 1GB RAM and was able to play through the whole game perfectly at 1280x1024 with mid-level AA and AF. if HL2 is running that poorly for you, you might want to look into something else that's slowing your system down...

if you decide to upgrade anyway, i'd go with a better video card...any difference from a new cpu would be pretty minimal compared to that, and everything in your rig is pretty good. you would get better audio effects in some games with an Audigy2-ZS at some point, but that's not really a performance issue.

Do you have the 9800 Pro with 256 MB RAM or the 128 version? Also, I timed my "Loading" times last night. It took between 1 and 2 minutes, more often toward the high side of that.

Do you use the standard ATI drivers or something else? Do you overclock the video card?

And I am looking at other issues. I'm taking the shotgun approach at researching hoping 1 bullet hits. I've spent most of today installing the latest drivers. I've found new drivers for chipset and network. I'm using www.drivershq.com and then trying to find the drivers on regular sites. It reports some drivers as out of date but I know I have the latest now. I've also done several defrag passes until I ended up with 0 fragmented files.

And I want better audio as well. If it weren't for general performance issues I'd be getting that Audigy2 and speakers to match.

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:44 pm

I ran HL2 just fine on a 1.4 ghz, 512 RAM, Geforce 3 card. Granted, I didn't crank all the extras, but it still looked great and ran very smoothly. Upgrading your system won't fix the lack of a storyline, but if you're determined to do something, I'd go for the GPU.

Sith

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:44 pm

HAPPY, HAPPY, JOY, JOY!

It seems like the settings in my ATI Control Panel got changed somewhere along the way, maybe when I installed the Rage3D tweak driver. Anyway, I did a reset to factory defaults and things work well again. Load times around 30-40 seconds. No more stuttering in the game. I figured something was up when I tried to run 3DMark03 and it told me I couldn't because my card did not support 3D Compressed Textures with some explanation of DXT1, DXT3 or something like that. Knowing that this card would for sure support something in 03, I went looking through the settings and surfing the web. Under the 3D API Specific, the "Support DXT Texture formats" was NOT checked. I found an item under the preferences and set "Restore Factory Defaults" and was then able to run 3DMark03 and got my highest score ever. I then went to HL2 and things run the way I described in this message.

Thanks for all the help guys........especially you disarm. You pointed me back in the right direction.

- shaggy

disarm · Post by **disarm** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 4:46 am

shaggydoug wrote:HAPPY, HAPPY, JOY, JOY!

It seems like the settings in my ATI Control Panel got changed somewhere along the way, maybe when I installed the Rage3D tweak driver. Anyway, I did a reset to factory defaults and things work well again. Load times around 30-40 seconds. No more stuttering in the game. I figured something was up when I tried to run 3DMark03 and it told me I couldn't because my card did not support 3D Compressed Textures with some explanation of DXT1, DXT3 or something like that. Knowing that this card would for sure support something in 03, I went looking through the settings and surfing the web. Under the 3D API Specific, the "Support DXT Texture formats" was NOT checked. I found an item under the preferences and set "Restore Factory Defaults" and was then able to run 3DMark03 and got my highest score ever. I then went to HL2 and things run the way I described in this message.

Thanks for all the help guys........especially you disarm. You pointed me back in the right direction.

- shaggy

sounds like things are running more correctly now...it really didn't seem right that the game was running that poorly with your hardware. glad to hear you got it figured out 8)

to answer some of your earlier questions to me (although it's less important now)...
i have a 128mb 9800 Pro and have been running the Catalyst 4.12 drivers for quite a while now (including when i played HL2). those drivers are a little old, but they work great, so i've seen no reason to update yet. i haven't bothered to overclock anything because i've been able to run anything i want just fine at standard speeds to this point.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 7:54 am

shaggydoug wrote: CPU: P4 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 1 GB 3200
Video: Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB
Disk: 7200 RPM SATA (no raid at this time)
Sound: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

I'm a little bit surprised. The only difference between your system and mine is that I have a 3.2GHz P4 and I have the Radeon 9800 XT 256MB. It runs HL2 at max settings (everything cranked up) flawlessly.

Based on that - I'm guessing that your problem is the 128MB of memory on your video card (i.e. I concur with Blackhawk). Get yourself a fancy new video card.

disarm · Post by **disarm** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 1:37 pm

RunningMn9 wrote:I'm a little bit surprised. The only difference between your system and mine is that I have a 3.2GHz P4 and I have the Radeon 9800 XT 256MB. It runs HL2 at max settings (everything cranked up) flawlessly.

Based on that - I'm guessing that your problem is the 128MB of memory on your video card (i.e. I concur with Blackhawk). Get yourself a fancy new video card.

or read what he said two posts above yours...it was a video setting issue and has since been resolved. he's got the game running well now without any new hardware

the game runs great with a 128mb 9800 Pro 8)

shaggydoug · Post by **shaggydoug** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 10:20 pm

Yes, Everything works well. Nobody Goes To Ravenholm Anymore.

What's odd is that this is the level in the demo. I'm kind of disappointed that I played the demo. I like the way the Jedi Knight series demos were where you played a level not in the game.

I've looked at getting an Audigy2 ZS and 5.1 speakers. That's also around $250 for the package. Just need to figure out how to get that past the wife now.

- shaggy

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