[jr2]

Just get 2x 1GB 3200 sticks and be done with it. 

[Herra Tohtori]

http://www.kingston.com/branded/default.asp
http://www.memorystock.com/desktop-memory.htm

Check those out, they seem to offer quite accurate information about desktops and their memory upgrades.

->CP5670: Thanks for correcting me, that information was new to me... SO, I wouldn't be able to buy just a single 1 GB module in addition to my two 512MB modules, as I have a S939 MOBO/processor? I would have to buy two new modules if I would like to upgrade my PC's memory (presuming I would keep the old memory modules in the PC as well as the new ones).

...well, that sucks. I guess I'll have to get those two 1GB sticks as well...

[fsphiladelphia]

Just get 2x 1GB 3200 sticks and be done with it. 

I'd love to...but that upgrade may not be in the card$ 

[jr2]

Try shopping online?
EDIT: Careful you get it from a good source, though.  (Newegg, TigerDirect, BestBuy, some others...)
Or you could eBay for a NIB (new in box) one, as long as the seller has a high rating.

[fsphiladelphia]

Try shopping online?
EDIT: Careful you get it from a good source, though.  (Newegg, TigerDirect, BestBuy, some others...)
Or you could eBay for a NIB (new in box) one, as long as the seller has a high rating.

I think I may go that route.  I hate waiting for, and paying for shipping, however, the prices at tigerdirect.com are literally almost 50% off of what Micro Center charges, and Mircro Center is pretty competitive as far as in-person retailers go.  The 7600gt was only $100 after rebate, which was the same as newegg/tigerdirect, but on RAM, it seems like MC is getting killed.  Likely I'll go home, find out exactly what I have, make a decision about what I need to get, find it online, and jot the price down.  If the store here has it within $10 or so of what it is online, I'll just get it in person, but the savings on ram, online, seems too much to pass up.

[fsphiladelphia]

...

And the jack@ss of the day award goes to:  myself.

You guys probably won't believe this, but I did have 1GB of ram all along (which, incidentally, I *thought* I did prior to yesterday).  Turns out I dislodged one of the two modules yesterday when installing the 7600GT.  It's two 512 PC3200's, so presumably I'm running in dual channel.  Looks like RAM won't be an issue after all.

I feel a little silly, but at least I won't be spending any money.  Now back to fiddling with my graphics settings.

[Turey]

...

And the jack@ss of the day award goes to:  myself.

You guys probably won't believe this, but I did have 1GB of ram all along (which, incidentally, I *thought* I did prior to yesterday).  Turns out I dislodged one of the two modules yesterday when installing the 7600GT.  It's two 512 PC3200's, so presumably I'm running in dual channel.  Looks like RAM won't be an issue after all.

I feel a little silly, but at least I won't be spending any money.  Now back to fiddling with my graphics settings.

 

[fsphiladelphia]

Emboldened by the 1 gig of ram, and realizing I had therefore not yet actually seen what the 7600GT was truly capable of, I set the graphics settings as follows (fully expecting more of the same):

FSO:  Everything on, adveffects on, AF 16, Vsynch off

Nvidia:  AF = software controlled, Vsynch On, AA 8xS, Texture filtering:  quality

Any situation without capships (normal flying, dogfights):  120fps
Staring at the fleet + luxor station:  ~85-95fps
Dogfighting while fleet and/or luxor station are on screen:  ~45-90fps, never less than 45 though
Not moving, watching capships fire beams at one another:  ~30-50fps
Dogfighting in the middle of beams going off, capships moving, shockwaves exploding:  ~25-50fps
Near shockwave, or if something warped in, possible small pause; in the middle of one huge shockwave, it dropped for a moment, to 13fps.

First, the game remained at all times fluid and playable.  Second, with the settings that high, it looked absolutely amazing.  Third, I am floored by these results.  Without much tinkering, my rig is really plowing through a lot of activity and holding up relatively well.  With tinkering, I think it's conceivable I could get it to my goal of never really dropping below 25, and not hiccuping.

Perhaps the best part of the whole thing was that when a shuttle or smaller cap ship, like a food container or frigate got blown up in the 2000+ km range, the shockwaves did not cause an interruption at all whatsoever to the action.

Now let's see what improvements I can make.

[fsphiladelphia]

Huggybaby -- I took your suggestions and installed the more sane glowmaps for the beams as well as the mid-range shockwaves.

The game ran flawlessly -- no pauses, no hiccups, and even in the most intense situations, tons of stuff, capships, whatever, it never dropped below maybe 35.

 

Thanks to everyone here for their suggestions!

[jr2]

Hi fsphiladelphia. I have the exact same system specs as you do, except i have 1.5gb of ram. System ram is not a culprit in speed with the fso even with mv_adveffects.

  Look at his results, 512 vs 1024. 

[S-99]

Well for me i have 1.5gb of ram, and it's all dual channeled. Of course dual channeling your ram only affects system memory and not what's on your video card(this is like a given but i wasn't sure if fsphiladelphia knew or not...probably did know).

Jr2 get your numbers right, that's actually 512 vs 1536 actually. Any good job for him already having a gig and him making it work again
While we're on the subject, the 7600gt is a ridiculously good midrange card. The 7600gt outperforms the radeon x1800 and comes on par with the x1900. Nvidia has seriously outdone themselves with the geforce 7 series, otherwise i wouldn't have bought one.

Apparently none of you know the advantages of utilizing vsync properly. Vsync will lock your framerate to that of the refresh rate, if you have a monitor that does over 60hertz then you'll have more of a fun time. But, if you something less like a strobe light such as 85hertz, you can sustain a framerate that won't try to go over or under 85fps. The benefit of this is that it helps eliminate tearing, maintains the framerate, all adding up to an extremely smooth visual experience. Another benefit of utilizing vsync is that while it keeps your framerate from jumping so much, it also frees up the processor for doing other stuff such as visuals (providing a good balance), as opposed to trying to maintain as high a framerate the game can do plus advanced visuals and all the other geometry, shading, lighting, and other **** gpus do. Quite frankly it provides the best game experience when utilized properly as opposed to maintaining the maximum framerate at all times. Trying to maintain the maximum possible framerate at all times does get counterintuitive after a while.

[jr2]

Apparently none of you know the advantages of utilizing vsync properly.

Besides me.  1024x1080 (I think), 85 Hz, V-Sync on.  8)

[S-99]

Ok cool, so i'm not the only one. 85 hertz is a good selection, because it's not a strobe light like 60 hertz, and also it's not too high of a refresh rate to make your card maintain a framerate at. I'm sure if you had 120hertz your card would have a hard time maintaining that all the time as opposed to 85 hertz(also for me in 1024x768 85hertz is the highest refresh rate my monitor will do in that resolution).

[CP5670]

The 7600gt outperforms the radeon x1800 and comes on par with the x1900. Nvidia has seriously outdone themselves with the geforce 7 series, otherwise i wouldn't have bought one.

Uh, no, those cards are not comparable at all. The X1900s are more than twice as fast.

The 7 series was overall not nearly as good as the 6 and 8 series. It was only an evolutionary improvement over the 6 series in terms of speed, and they also introduced the AF shimmering. You could basically get rid of it by switching to high quality mode, but the performance hit from that was anywhere between 5 and 30% depending on the game. The 6 and 8 series cards never had/have this problem.

[jr2]

Actually, I forgot... I run my desktop at 1024x1080, FS I think I cut down to 1024x768, because of distortion in x1080 (aspect ratio different).

[Wobble73]

This may seem like a silly question to most but I'm a bit out of date when it comes to the latest graphics cards, (need to start reading the computer mags again). But what's everyones opinion on the ATI Radeon 9250 (256mb) as a card. My brother-in-law has just got one second hand from his brother and wants me to fit it for him, I just want to know if it would be worth it?

[S-99]

Well, all i know is that the x1600 and the x1800 suck. So far the best midrange card out of the 7 series is the 7600gt, and it's even better to buy it compared to x1600 especially.
Who gives a **** about the AF shimmering, i don't really see it my games, then again i don't bring it over 2x, as i usually don't use it at anything higher just my preference i guess.
I took your word for it and found one of the benchmarks i referenced.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTAzOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
It's the card i own versus an x1800 gto. It's about of equal performance to an x1800 gto. I remembered my information incorrectly (i was checking benchmarks seeing if it was a good idea for me to get an x1600 which the x1600 pretty much sucked). I mistakenly remembered 19 instead of 18. But when looking for a midrange card i recommend a 7600gt, great performance, it's a good buy and will satisfy.
At least the geforce 7 series performs much better than the 6 series and i believe it was the 7600gt's and higher have hd-dvd and blu-ray hardware acceleration that remove as much as 40% of the work away from the processor when watching hd off the two mediums (highly recommended to have dual core when playing hd dvd or blu ray).

[Herra Tohtori]

Apparently none of you know the advantages of utilizing vsync properly.

Well... I've confined to 60 FPS on hardware, that's as much as my monitor can do but since it's LCD it doesn't have the "strobe" effect that the CRT's have.

Anyhow, I've noticed that I usually get better results when I disable VSynck in the launcher, but enable driver level VSync from NVidia's CP. For some reason, the frame rate drops are larger if VSync is enabled on Launcher... dunno why. Perhaps because the code has to do that much more on one pass or somesuch.

[fsphiladelphia]

Apparently none of you know the advantages of utilizing vsync properly.

Anyhow, I've noticed that I usually get better results when I disable VSynck in the launcher, but enable driver level VSync from NVidia's CP. For some reason, the frame rate drops are larger if VSync is enabled on Launcher... dunno why. Perhaps because the code has to do that much more on one pass or somesuch.

I ran with this Vsync suggestion as well.  I've got it off in launcher and on in the NVidia control panel.  On the desktop I have it set to the same as the game, 1280x1024, but for some reason the highest refresh rate I can get is 75hz.  I will experiment tonight to see if setting vsynch on in the launcher yields a constant 75 fps.  It would be nice because I can't much tell the difference between a 75 fps situation and a 120 fps situation, but it would definitely improve those moments where it drops to 35 or so.  However, I like the results I've had so far and it is off as of now, in launcher.

While I agree in theory that the constant framerate would create a more consistent experience and possibly free up resources which would otherwise be working to up the framerate when it drops, I'm not convinced that turning it on is going to help me in situations where it drops to 35 fps, or 50 fps -- I am sort of of the mind that in those situations, that's just the best the rig can do with what FSO is throwing at it.

Nonetheless, system RAM has some kind of impact.  The difference was dramatic when I reinstalled (!) that disconnected module.

[CP5670]

Who gives a **** about the AF shimmering, i don't really see it my games, then again i don't bring it over 2x, as i usually don't use it at anything higher just my preference i guess.

You need a better monitor in that case. The default quality AF looks like garbage compared to cards from the other generations of either company's lines. There is a reason why many of the later reviews of the 7 series models used HQ mode after the issue became more well known. A 7600GT is still a great buy and easily the best choice in the sub-$100 price range, but let's be realistic about its capabilities.

Also, 2x AF hardly does anything. You may as well have it at 16x (the performance hit from 16x is tiny on default quality mode) or leave it off altogether if you want to minimize the shimmering and other artifacts.

The HD acceleration may be useful, but you have to pay extra for Nvidia's decoder software for it do anything (ATI's AVIVO thing has the same problem). Apparently that has something to do with royalty fees.

Vsync and TB are definitely a must in a game with smooth turning motions like FS2. It defaults to be on, actually. However, note that it actually reduces the overall framerates slightly (even when the framerate is below the refresh rate) and TB also causes a slight stuttering effect in some situations. You'll get the highest framerates with it turned off, but motion also won't look smooth.