Hi, I hope someone can point me in the right direction with this, it's been driving me mental for a while.
When playing certain new-ish games (Half-Life 2 and Oblivion for example) I have this problem where whatever changes I makes to the quality settings have next to no effect on my performance. In HL2 I get the same 25-30fps exiting the train station at the beginning on the lowest settings and at 640x480 as I do with everything turned up and at 1280x1024. Since buying the game on launch I've upgraded both my RAM and video card (a 9800pro which should have been fine to play the game with) yet still get the same performance.
My setup at the moment (due a decent upgrade, but that's a ways off financially):
2.40ghz P4 800FSB
Asus P4P8X motherboard
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card
6800 Ultra AGP (256mb)
1gb RAM
I've been through everything I can think of, AGP is set to 8x, defragged, reinstalled XP, changed hardware, the whole lot but nothing seems to make a difference. The only thing I can think of now is an IRQ conflict, the 6800 Ultra is on the same IRQ as some USB controllers and the soundcard is on one with my ethernet. But I've since read that IRQ conflicts shouldn't matter that much with ACPI and it's made very difficult to change them anyway (there's no options for it in my BIOS).
To be honest I'm just expecting that I'm going to have to live with it until it's time for a full upgrade but maybe someone on here can see what's happening.
Thanks for reading
When playing certain new-ish games (Half-Life 2 and Oblivion for example) I have this problem where whatever changes I makes to the quality settings have next to no effect on my performance. In HL2 I get the same 25-30fps exiting the train station at the beginning on the lowest settings and at 640x480 as I do with everything turned up and at 1280x1024. Since buying the game on launch I've upgraded both my RAM and video card (a 9800pro which should have been fine to play the game with) yet still get the same performance.
My setup at the moment (due a decent upgrade, but that's a ways off financially):
2.40ghz P4 800FSB
Asus P4P8X motherboard
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card
6800 Ultra AGP (256mb)
1gb RAM
I've been through everything I can think of, AGP is set to 8x, defragged, reinstalled XP, changed hardware, the whole lot but nothing seems to make a difference. The only thing I can think of now is an IRQ conflict, the 6800 Ultra is on the same IRQ as some USB controllers and the soundcard is on one with my ethernet. But I've since read that IRQ conflicts shouldn't matter that much with ACPI and it's made very difficult to change them anyway (there's no options for it in my BIOS).
To be honest I'm just expecting that I'm going to have to live with it until it's time for a full upgrade but maybe someone on here can see what's happening.
Thanks for reading