floydimus86
February 17th, 2005, 12:00 AM
Ok my computer isnt a smokin' alienware or anything but its a Compaq Presario AMD Athlon 64 (3200) w/ 512 RAM. It came with an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 card and i used to think this worked well with my computer. Then i got a few games and found out some of them i had to dumb down to 640 * 480 resolution!
So after some advice from this forum i gathered about $200 and bought myself an ATI Radeon 9600 XT. Got it installed, and DRAMATIC improvements on my games. I got half life 2..awesome game and ran smoothly.
Now , I am still having a few problems. Nothing too serious, and maybe it is common and i am just a perfectionist, but i do notice ( moreso in games maybe like 2 years old ) That when I play a game, you ,know, when you first actually load the level of a game, the first few minutes are rather sluggish , the frame rate is kinda quirky and low. I mean, i'd be panning around my surroundings in a first person shooter, when suddenly the frame freezes for about a second or so , like it's "loading" something. But after about 2 times of "panning" my field of view in a complete 360 degree arc of my surroundings, it starts to run smoothly , no flaws whatsoever and very fast. The games i play a lot are stuff like Operation flashpoint, which has a lot of textures and objects on the map at once. There are large open outdoor environments with hills, etc.. and at the beginning of the level i have the slow framerate for a few minutes till I do the 360 pan thing. Then it is fine , until maybe perhaps i climb into an apache helicopter, and see some hills that perhaps i didnt see before. Or perhaps my groups squad leader leads us over the top of a hill, that was not within my field of view before. This is when sometimes the framerates chug again. Whenever some new textures are introduced , the problems occur. Please note that operation flashpoint is a relatively old game and should not be demanding on my computer. This does happen in other games as well, even new ones such as Half life 2, but not so noticable.
My guess is its doing something like "initializing" the textures that are introduced on screen. I could be wrong, but could ya'll give me your opinion on it? is there any way to improve upon it? is it a common problem that should just be ignored?
So after some advice from this forum i gathered about $200 and bought myself an ATI Radeon 9600 XT. Got it installed, and DRAMATIC improvements on my games. I got half life 2..awesome game and ran smoothly.
Now , I am still having a few problems. Nothing too serious, and maybe it is common and i am just a perfectionist, but i do notice ( moreso in games maybe like 2 years old ) That when I play a game, you ,know, when you first actually load the level of a game, the first few minutes are rather sluggish , the frame rate is kinda quirky and low. I mean, i'd be panning around my surroundings in a first person shooter, when suddenly the frame freezes for about a second or so , like it's "loading" something. But after about 2 times of "panning" my field of view in a complete 360 degree arc of my surroundings, it starts to run smoothly , no flaws whatsoever and very fast. The games i play a lot are stuff like Operation flashpoint, which has a lot of textures and objects on the map at once. There are large open outdoor environments with hills, etc.. and at the beginning of the level i have the slow framerate for a few minutes till I do the 360 pan thing. Then it is fine , until maybe perhaps i climb into an apache helicopter, and see some hills that perhaps i didnt see before. Or perhaps my groups squad leader leads us over the top of a hill, that was not within my field of view before. This is when sometimes the framerates chug again. Whenever some new textures are introduced , the problems occur. Please note that operation flashpoint is a relatively old game and should not be demanding on my computer. This does happen in other games as well, even new ones such as Half life 2, but not so noticable.
My guess is its doing something like "initializing" the textures that are introduced on screen. I could be wrong, but could ya'll give me your opinion on it? is there any way to improve upon it? is it a common problem that should just be ignored?