I have a 1920x1200 but even with 2x BFG 9800GTs in SLI it's slow

marcosscriven · 2 Mar 2006 at 11:02

I have a 1920x1200 but even with 2x BFG 7800GTs in SLI it's slow

Just a little background before I ask my q's:

Asus A8N sli premium
AMD X2 4400+
2 x BFG 7800GT
2Gig mem
Apple 1920x1200 monitor

So, I can play Half-Life 2 just about at native res, but things like F.E.A.R and Black & White 2 drop down to sub-10 fps sometimes.

I've got a few options, which would you recommend:

1) Sell the Apple monitor and get a 1600x1200 or 1280x1024 monitor
2) Keep the Apple monitor and get another monitor in parallel.
3) Get a better graphics set up.

Some basic calculations I did:

1280 x 1024 = 1.31 million pixels
1600 x 1200 = 1.92 million pixels (47% more than 1280x1024)
1920 x 1200 = 2.30 million pixels (20% more than 1600x1200, 176% more than 1280x1024)

So if I drop to 1920 to 1600 horizontal, we're talking about a fitfh difference. Will that equate to roughly a 20% FPS? Is it that simple?

ajgoodfellow · 2 Mar 2006 at 12:08

I'd look at a possible underlying problem - you should be able to run games at the native res of the screen with your 7800GTs

Have you tried benchmarking your system with 3D Mark?

Have you installed your chipset drivers and your latest graphics card drivers? Have you installed the dual core fix?

What detail levels are you playing at? As an example, turning on soft shadows in FEAR really cripples frame rates

marcosscriven · 2 Mar 2006 at 12:41

Thanks - I did run some benchmarks a while ago, but forgotten the figures. I'll do that this evening and post here.

I do have all the very latest drivers though (as of tuesday anyway) and a completely new XP build.

With B&W2 for instance, I'm not even using anti-aliasing at all! and still in the more complex scene it goes down to 7fps. best it does is around 25-30

ajgoodfellow · 2 Mar 2006 at 13:16

That's odd. Not quite sure what the problem is - what happens if you turn off SLi?

marcosscriven · 2 Mar 2006 at 13:29

i'll give that a go too!

Steve · 2 Mar 2006 at 15:36

I had 2x gtx on the same monitor with an fx57 @ 3.4gig and newer games like fear etc crippled it at native res with all eye candy and AF and AA

I started running things in a window where possible or a a lower resand let the monitor scale is up, not Ideal but not awful

marcosscriven · 2 Mar 2006 at 17:19

I have to say it is rather disappointing!

fish99 · 2 Mar 2006 at 17:36

Not surprising to me, 1920*1200 is one heck of a res, and Fear is probably the most demanding game around. I know I had to drop Fear down to 1024*768 on my X800 XT PE (with no AA). 7800 GT is same core/memory speed as my card with 4 pipelines more. So I can see why 2 of them would struggle with 1920*1200. And of course SLI isn't fully double the performance.