flybyil 0 Posted November 22, 2005 I've recently updated my PC's graphics card to Radeon 9800 128 Pro and the improvement I gained with the new GCard is a little disappointment to me. The visual quality is only slightly better than my old card's (Radeon 9000 Pro) quality. Usually fog looks better / more natural but the overall performance and visual quality are almost the same as before. Either a) Radeon 9800 128 Pro is over-advertized or b) there are some adjustments still to be made and I just don't know what they are. Some specs: Win2000 KT4V (VIA chipset) 512 Mb AMD Athlon 1800+ R9800Pro Creative Labs soundcard. The driver for the GCard is dated 25th October 2005 so it is "the latest driver". I had this new card already before I bought OFP GOTY edition but it took me some time to find out that in order the get it work I should 1) update motherboard (VIA "4-in-1"), 2) install Microsoft's .Netframe . Before these two (and the latest driver) updates the GCard didn't work at all and I thought that I had bought a broken card. As sometimes things just fall together, I happened to find the solution for that problem in OFP community. In other words OFP made it possible for me to install properly the new GCard which I had bought before I knew I was going to buy OFP... Back to the point: while I was there (installing) I readjusted BIOS by choosing "Set high performance settings" and got rid of the crashing problem and it looks like got rid of it for good (Knock on wood. Knock, knock) But why this not-so-good performance ? Can it be so that OPF just cannot be set to perform high quality and to run smoothly at the same time? NB: I saw in Troubleshooting FAQ suggestions referring to how to adjust IRQ settings, IDE settings and mentions about PC latency settings. Should I adjust these settings? If I should I could use a piece of a good advice here how to adjust and from where. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Placebo 29 Posted November 22, 2005 What drivers are you using? What settings are you trying to use in Flashpoint? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
flybyil 0 Posted November 22, 2005 Placebo: I'm not at my own PC right now to check out the exact settings but here's something: 1) can't tell the version number of the driver, only the release date (Oct 25th 2005). 2.1) Flashpoint settings: a) I've used 800x600 32b (recommended in the manual) and 1024x768 32b. Maybe the latter looks a bit better than the former. b) Screen 75Hz or 85 Hz (my monitor supports these). c) Highest frame rate, Low terrain, about 4/5 of the max quality, about 2/3 of the max drawing distance. 2.2) Radeon settings: tried to switch between Best Berformance and Best Quality and few wild quessies in between those two. Tried Game Default settings and User Defined settings. NB: R9800 seems to be consuming vast amounts of memory. OFP starts stuttering after 10 minutes of playing (not always, seems to be depending on in what kind of environment the mission takes place...). If I don't let my Memory Freeing program (called RamBooster) to run I can see that after 10 minutes of playing there may be as little as 11% free memory left out of 512 Mb. Better keep that RamBooster running. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Cyberpunk 0 Posted November 22, 2005 Once i have a problem similar to this. I add a bad addon on my addons folder. Check your addons folder (\Addons and \Res\Addons) and check if they are ok. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LoTekK 0 Posted November 22, 2005 Couple of things. Your video card will not consume system RAM. The game is what does that. That and any other programs. I had a 9800 Pro, also a 128MB model, and I don't recall having any significant issues with the game, and this was over a year ago (it's possible reverting to an older driver might help). Especially with the settings you've listed, the 9800 Pro should typically have no problem handling the game. Heck, even on my integrated Intel 915 I can run those settings without any problems. The question is, though, with regards to performance improvement over your old 9000, what settings were you running at on that card? About RAMBooster (and this is actually what my gut is telling me is the cause of your performance issues). I've never used it myself, so I don't know exactly how it works, but I would get rid of it when you play the game. 11% of 512 free is absolutely fine. If RAMbooster doesn't play nice with the game, and decides it's eating too much RAM (therefore swapping it out to pagefile) you'll more than likely see much more swappage than you should. This is all conjecture, but it's fairly educated guessing. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kevbaz 0 Posted November 23, 2005 get rid of the stock drivers and grab the latest omega version http://www.omegadrivers.net/ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gordy 0 Posted November 23, 2005 OFP is not stricktly GPU based. Most of the gains come from RAM (512MB is way too little) and CPU. Remeber when OFP was created. It doesn't support all that fancy crap the card has. I came from 8500 to 9800 PRO and there was little change. When I came from P4 1.4 to 3.0 and from 512MB to 2GB I can suddenly run 5000 viewdistance without hickups. Only when I set highest detail It gets down to 20 FPS or so. I wonder what it would be when I get my Athlon 64 X2 4800 + 4GB RAM + 2x GF7800. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
flybyil 0 Posted November 24, 2005 Things are improving. I've adjusted some BIOS settings more, tried different ATI settings and reduced the drawing distance to around 1000. Now OFP runs smoothly even in High Terrain level with max Pic Quality. I can even have all the shadows on now. I was the incompetent one, not Radeon 9800. Thank you all for your support. Delighted to see how well this community works. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
