Athlon 64

floydimus86 · #1 August 11th, 2005, 07:09 AM

I have a compaq presario with AMD athlon 64 3200 processor..it has 512mb of the DDR RAM and my video card is an ATI Radeon 9600 xt and I have the latest version of catalyst and have tweaked it for more performance for some of the newer games such as far cry, half life 2, medal of honor pacific assault etc..

I notice that the framerate is generally good in most places in all these games but there is usually some parts in the game where i might look in a certain direction and it goes from being nice, fast smooth, to being choppy like a slideshow ..sometimes even freezing. I play most games on 1280x 1040 resolution or something like that, but when i dropped res. to 1024 x 768 or whatever it is..the problem still sometimes occurs..maybe not AS bad but it is still stuttering and all. I didn't think my specs were THAT bad...

is there anything I can do to help performance with it still looking decent?

One thing i've always wondered...I do not believe the 64 bit processor is enabled..is there any thing i can do to enable it? or do i have to actually buy windows64 to use it, or are there any 3rd party drivers out there...or am i just talking nonsense.. i would think that a 64bit processor would perform better than this so I am not convinced I am getting the full benefit. Any suggestions? thanks

**smurfy** · #2 August 12th, 2005, 11:48 AM

Hi there.
That system should comfortably run most games. Does the choppiness occur at the same point in games where you repeat identical maps?
You may be able to turn down some of the advanced settings (rather than resolution) like antriscopic filtering or anti-aliasing to try to reduce the amount of slowdown.
Also make sure you limit the multitasking you are doing when gaming (close as many other programs as you can).

As far as the 64bit CPU goes,
1) it's going to make absolutely no difference while you are running Windows 32bit and not a great deal of difference if you update to XP64. Wait for Longhorn or switch to Linux.
2) the games you are running make no extra use of a 64-bit CPU so it will be no better or worse even if you are running the 64-bit O/S.

oracle128 · #3 August 13th, 2005, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smurfy

1) it's going to make absolutely no difference while you are running Windows 32bit and not a great deal of difference if you update to XP64.

Unless you're running mathematical-intensive programs designed specifically for Windows XP 64-bit Edition.

Quote:

Originally Posted by smurfy

Wait for Longhorn or switch to Linux.

You of course mean Windows Vista

Quote:

Originally Posted by smurfy

2) the games you are running make no extra use of a 64-bit CPU so it will be no better or worse even if you are running the 64-bit O/S.

Not only that, but you have to upgrade all your device drivers to 64-bit versions, which some manufacturers do not have.