[haloboy100]

Oh man, I've been so bored lately since I can't play anything at all since I installed vista yesterday. So I guess I'll occupy my self by trying to solve a problem.

For the past few years - hell, always, I have been getting frame rate problems with games that i have twice, if not 5 times as much, the recommended system requirements. A few examples are Unreal Tournament 2004, Halo, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars Empire At War. FSO, for some reason, has always seen top-notch performance. My computer never had any viruses, always had at least 10 GB of spare memory in hard drive at any given time (knowing the capacity is 150 GB). I don't know if the requirements are wrong on the games which is unlikely, or something wrong with the specs that my computer gives me. I did recently think of a few possible reasons:

I have 1024 MB of RAM (combined with 256 GB of VRAM on my Nvidea geforce 6200), which is 5 times as much needed to run ut2004, but i still get laggy frame rates. It could possibly be because my RAM is slow, but it was ALWAYS laggy, even after extended periods of nonstop game time. My RAM has a speed of 333 Mega Hertz.

Another possible problem is that my CPU is over clocked. It is a 1.99 gigahertz rated for 2.99 gigahertz performance because of the over clocking.

I really hope I can solve this, thanks in advance for your guys' help.

[Rand al Thor]

You'll need to upload a complete system profile to get any real analysis and even then it'll be just guess work. If your cpu is overclocked by 1MHz (or the performance equivalent) then it might be running to hot, which would reduce performance and probably damage it eventually. Are you sure it's actually overclocked? It's not just an Athlon XP 3000 or something that runs at 1.9GHz but has a equivalent pentium performance of 3GHz?

Your ram should be fine enough. You'd probably notice an improvement with another Gig but then again maybe not until you get this problem sorted. I guess try checking your pc's performance and the number of processes running at any time you get slowdown and see if it's the game or another process sucking up all your cpu time. To check if your memory's dodgy do a search for memtest86 (I think). It's a bootable floppy based program that with put your RAM through a hefty workout and can tell you if its bad. It recommends running overnight or longer but whenever I've had a noticably (in windows stability) bad stick it's identified it almost immediately.

It could be drivers. Or a badly defragmented or error filled hard drive. I dunno what you've tried already so if you've just reformatted you drive, drivers let us know.

And if you've just installed Vista and are trying to get that to run stuff then (although I can't say this from personnal experience) I've heard it's a monster for sucking performance out of a pc and drivers are currently rubbish for it. !Gig of RAM would be the minimum for vista too AFAIK.

Gudluk!

[haloboy100]

ya vista is a huge system hog, it runs 35% of my 1GB of  RAM alone, and the reaction time is crap. but i guess it's to late to revert now, i've settled in much already.

and i remember very well overclocking my CPU, me and my dad did it together. (you know you press delete or wahtever while booting up and goto CPU options)

I did frequently update my drivers, or tried anyway, using windows update or deviece manager, i never in my entire life defragmented a hard drive, as i have no idea what the point is. (though i DO know what it is so ya)

if you want my full gaming rig, i uploaded it to http://www.xfire.com/profile/haloboy100/ it says i got 2.4 ghz, but that was after i installed vista so it might be busted there.

[IceFire]

Oh man, I've been so bored lately since I can't play anything at all since I installed vista yesterday. So I guess I'll occupy my self by trying to solve a problem.

For the past few years - hell, always, I have been getting frame rate problems with games that i have twice, if not 5 times as much, the recommended system requirements. A few examples are Unreal Tournament 2004, Halo, Star Wars Galaxies, and Star Wars Empire At War. FSO, for some reason, has always seen top-notch performance. My computer never had any viruses, always had at least 10 GB of spare memory in hard drive at any given time (knowing the capacity is 150 GB). I don't know if the requirements are wrong on the games which is unlikely, or something wrong with the specs that my computer gives me. I did recently think of a few possible reasons:

I have 1024 MB of RAM (combined with 256 GB of VRAM on my Nvidea geforce 6200), which is 5 times as much needed to run ut2004, but i still get laggy frame rates. It could possibly be because my RAM is slow, but it was ALWAYS laggy, even after extended periods of nonstop game time. My RAM has a speed of 333 Mega Hertz.

Another possible problem is that my CPU is over clocked. It is a 1.99 gigahertz rated for 2.99 gigahertz performance because of the over clocking.

I really hope I can solve this, thanks in advance for your guys' help.

Well the thing that jumps out at me here is the GeForce 6200.  The mistake is to look at how much video ram a video card has.  Some absolutely crap cards are now sporting 256mb of video ram either in combination with system ram (which is what you're doing) or even on their own.  So the problem here for frame rates is that you have a GeForce 6200 which is a basic entry level card designed to be a cheap OEM installation into a business computer that might have a light multimedia purpose.  Thats essentially what that card is for.  You're also utilizing some of your system RAM for the video which cuts down on whats available and is probably pushing your system to run a swap file off the hard drive.  Hard drives are slow so ultimately its killing performance.  Backing off on the video memory to 128mb may actually help the situation depending on the game and settings being used (turn off anti-aliasing and lower the texture filtering).

If you want good performance then you need a more solid card.  A GeForce 7600GT is a steal right now...some can be found in the $120 range and they are twice or three times more powerful and capable than your 6200 is.  Even a 6600GT with 128mb of RAM will run circles around.

That will get you good performance.  Sorry to slag your machine but thats the honest truth.  Pop in a new more powerful card, tweak the system a bit, and you'll be flying along like never before.

[haloboy100]

i hope for my sake your right...I'm so pissed that i gotta lower settings cause i got 5 times the specs...

and for the record, by "compined" i mean just the fact that they are both working together in playing the game, not that i'm using my 1GB RAM or hard drive to sustitute for VRAM. it says on my 6200 box that it has 256 mb VRAM......

[WMCoolmon]

If I remember correctly, the GF5200 was rumored to be just as fast as the MX440 (its predecessor), but it actually added DX9 support. So in the end, it was actually slower, because the extra pixel shaders that it could do in DirectX 9 weren't compensated for with extra CPU power.

If they followed that pattern with the 6200 series, that's not a good thing at all. I'd suggest you look up some benchmarks to compare your card to the UT2004 specs. UT2004 is (or was) a common enough game to benchmark video cards on that there's a fair chance you'll be able to find a direct comparison.

[Bob-san]

So true; most people just look at the VRAM amount; they know nothing but that number and possibly the designation.

I got completely owned because I didn't understand these a long time ago. I purchased a GeForce FX5200 for DX9; i didn't realize it was a ripoff; high price for low performance. I just saw 128mb and a big 5200; i thought it would be excellent; guess what! IT wasn't!

[jr2]

Crap.  My first (new) card was a BFG 5200 OC 256.  Next, I got a BFG 6200 OC 256... Performance on both is mediocre.  I always thought it was my CPU.  Grrr...

[Bob-san]

I know the feeling; it was like 4 years ago I bought the FX5200; preformance is still mediocre, though it is DX9 compadible.