recommended upgrades for smooth fps

zytok

zytok

zytok

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12 Feb 2004
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Chesterfield
Have noticed recently that a few new titles, namely Gears of War, NFS Pro, Kane & Lynch etc seem to struggle on my system. This seems to be fairly regardless of settings used.

Was thinking about upgrading and wondered whether more RAM or a new GPU would be the best way forward. The GT's seem to be relatively easy to get hold of now and RAM is stupidly cheap.

Would upgrading the RAM to DDR800 make much of a difference? Would I need to flash my MB bios to use 4GB? I know that 32 bit OS's don't see the full 4GB but Vista is quite memory hungry.
 
His rig is in his signature Bug Eyed....
Well it is funny, your system actually looks pretty decent to me - nicely overclocked Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB of RAM and the 320 MB GTS aint a slouch either.
4GB of RAM wont make a huge amount of difference in most games.
What resolution are you running at? I hear GoW is very well optimised - it seems strange it would struggle on that system. You aren't running it in DX 10 mode are you?
 
native 17" LCD res so 1280x1024. It's not so much of that the games run slowly all the time, most of the time they are at 60fps. Seems to be to do with loading textures in. Grinds quite a bit. I'm on Vista and have it fully patched including the graphics memory handling bug fix thing.

Tried Gears of War under XP and it was worse. Under Vista, it seems to actaully play better in DX10/AA mode than not. Page file is fixed at 2.5GB and on a separate drive to the OS btw.
 
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Ah sorry - forgot I have avatars and signatures turned off as our Net connection at work is horrendous. :(

Have you tried other things - running defrags / spybot / virus etc to check for anything else that may be causing problems?

Other than that you should be fine really.
 
don't use anti-virus or anti-adware programs. In my book, if you're dumb enough to click on an internet link that says "click here to get a free laptop" or open an email with an attachment from someone claiming to be the deposed leader of Zanzibar offering you $50m if you let him have your bank details then you deserve all you get :)

More seriously though, it's a relatively clean (<1 week) install of Vista and the games are installed on a recently re-formatted 2nd drive so can't see there being any problems with fragmented files. Might try defragging the drive that has the page file on it though. That's full of crap.

Is no-one else getting irregular frame rates in these titles? Other stuff doesn't seem so bad. Bad coding/porting perhaps?
 
Gears of War tends to stutter a bit but I dont think its a hardware issue. If you check the official forums there are tweaks/workarounds that can ease it.
 
Ive got a similar set up to you as you can see from my sig and I run GOW maxed at 1280 x 1024 and get around 60fps but do get a stutter from time to time so I figure its the game and nothing else.
 
If I can persuade somone to buy my GTS for £125 then I would. The GT and extra RAM would only cost me about £50 then...

Was wondering whether it was the 320MB of RAM that was starting to show its age with newer, higher detail texture titles.

Does 4GB really help?
 
zytok said:
Was wondering whether it was the 320MB of RAM that was starting to show its age with newer, higher detail texture titles.

Does 4GB really help?
Click to expand...
That's exactly what it is. 320Mb isn't enough these days, even at 1280x1024. You could try turning off AA to reduce memory use, but an upgrade is your best option.

4Gb system ram won't make much difference to your gaming (if any). It's video memory you need.
 
i cant see 4gb of ram really making any noticable difference in gears of war...or in many games tbh.

e6600 @ 3ghz
2gig ram
8800gts 640mb

playing gears of war at 1680*1050 max detail
runs perfectly smooth.

only real difference in our systems is that my video card has more memory
 
zytok said:
don't use anti-virus or anti-adware programs. In my book, if you're dumb enough to click on an internet link that says "click here to get a free laptop" or open an email with an attachment from someone claiming to be the deposed leader of Zanzibar offering you $50m if you let him have your bank details then you deserve all you get :)
Click to expand...

I once did a reload on my machine. Got windows up and running and fell asleep. When I awoke, it was to find that I had received a nasty worm.
You don't have to download or click anything to receive one.
 
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