GeForce 9800 GX2

[Michael_Wittman 0]

Yesterday my hardware dealer delivered to me my brand new kickass computer, its a dual xeon quad core 2,4 Ghz with 4 Gb RAM and 250 Gb HD SATAII and a GeForce 9800 GX2 (1Gb DDR3) GPU.

I Downloaded the latest drivers for the GPU from the official Nvidia site, installed arma (1.05 sprocket ver) the patched it to 1.08 and then to 1.14.

I ran the game and set in-game resolution to 1600x1200, viewdistance to 3000 and setting to high.

Guess what.....yes....it runs like a truck full of horseshit.

Then...thinking I was asking too much i lowered almost all, disabled AA and AF set postpo to low.....etc.

Shit again

Lowered in-game res to 1200x1024

Shit again

Then I ran the arma benchmark....results...the highest is 15 fps the lowest is 6 fps.

So here I am with the latest and most powerfull single card ever created by Nvidia running a game 1 year old with graphic settings on average and getting 10-15 fps.....

WTF IS GOING ON????

All this is running on XP Home 32, Sp3 and DX9c

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!

[Mr_Tea 0]

Are the chipset drivers up to date, and BIOS too?

You would not believe what some stores sell to their costumers.

[gunterlund 0]

Michael

I have the same card and my game runs beautifully except for an occasional freeze.

Make sure your texture settings are on Normal, not high. This makes a big difference. my settings

Terrain detail - high

Objects detail - normal

texture detail - normal

shading detail - high

Postprocess effects - high

Anisotropic filtering - very high

shadow detail - high

antialiasing - normal

blood - high

running 1680x1050x32

view distance 4058

16:10 wide screen

Im running Vista 32

[Mr_Tea 0]

Textures on normal, and what for do you use up to date hardware?

If i can set the textures to high, or very high on my 7600GS it must work for you too.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

I have just seen this "* Note: Quad SLI technology with GeForce 9800 GX2, 3-way SLI technology, and Hybrid SLI technology are only supported on Windows Vista.

"

here Driver page for 9800 GX2

So FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuu

[kklownboy 43]

I have the same card, when it runs it runs great. Sp gaming i can max it out and deal with them low dips from hell.In multi play its med to high settings and always the great AA at high or higher settings. But it will just up and crash out of nowhere.... 1600/1200 @60hz hope your working with the nvidia control panel to set up the settings, like single display perfomance and multi GPU mode. App control for everything, tho i force vsync .

good luck

kk

PS on a side note, i had a much better non crash experience with CF. but the perfomance of the gx2 is stellar...

[Mr_Tea 0]

Buy Vista Home Premium OEM for a few bucks, €, or wathever and use it together with WinXP.

Even on my outdated rig, i can play ArmA on Vista Home Premium 32 Bit SP1 in high, very high settings.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

Ok, I have just installed it under Windows Vista, patched it to 1.14 and STILL RUNS LIKE A FUCKIN SPECTRUM 64k!!!!!!!!

WTH!!! Whats up with this f*** gpu?

I´m really starting to freak out on this thing, I´m thinking about sending it back to Nvidia through my dealer´s ass...all the way up.

[Pauldarrington 9]

have you tryed updating to SP1 and updating your directx drivers?

i dont have the same UBER specs as you but after 1.12 i had the bad FPS and stuttering,

but i updated too SP1 and updated directx and gfx card and its runs so beautiful now i have 40-50 fps and everything maxed out,apart from occasional freezes thats it.

TRY that mate

[Michael_Wittman 0]

My Vista is allready SP1, even that, I updated Vista, and its DX10.

[sickboy 13]

Did you try renaming arma.exe to fear.exe  ?

Reference:

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....ear.exe

Did you also upgrade all other drivers than the Video ones?

How about EAX, do you have an EAX accelerated audio card? If not, better turn off EAX in the sound option as it's known to cause slowdowns when there's no hardware acceleration available.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

fear profile doesnt work, renaming to fear.exe neither, disabling EAX....nothing.

this is killing me...I installed doom 3 and set it to 1600x1200 all eff max....it makes 100 fps.

[cross 1]

well...there is no reason for your PC to work like this...

Update all your drivers including..

GPU - switch to 175.63

DirectX 9.0c March2008 release (there is a separate release as it was not included in Vista SP1)

If still no good...talk to your dealer.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

Done that...still same crappy performance.

DX10 doesnt let me install DX9c

[Pauldarrington 9]

are you sure you updated too vista SP1? becouse as i stated before i had the same issues as you, and it all cleared after SP1 updated.

can u check again

[cross 1]

Done that...still same crappy performance.

DX10 doesnt let me install DX9c

You should be able to update the directX9...maybe theres a special update page or file. They operate as 2 separate versions afaik.

[baddo 0]

Check that you actually have the hardware you paid for.

It wouldn't be the first time when a dealer installs something else into a computer than what the buyer is paying for.

And it could have happened accidentally too.

[sandzibar 0]

hmm deja vu....

I had two 9800GTX's in SLI, on a quadcore 3ghz and it also ran like a dog.. my older kit got the same (or better) ArmaMark scores and that is an AMD3700 with an AGP 7600GT.

I sent mine back becouase it was crashing loads (i think due to OCZ memory and the 790i board). I had hoped that theyd also be able to solve the shit arma performance too..

But your issues make me think that its actually at BIS' end that things need addressing. Even with old stock drivers we should be getting 60+ fps at the low resolutions. I know its a bad situation after spending lots of cash on these new rigs, but it is a comfort to know that im not alone out there with serious arma performance issues on computers that should absolutely smash it.

Anyone from BIS care to lets us know whether theyve been able to get decent performance with 9800 series cards? Id imagine they must have one by now in order to test Arma2 developement on.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

Yes, its SP1. To say more this rig is focused on render with mental ray so BIOS setups are set by proffesional workstation dealers...it loads all aplications in a blink.

I bought this computer as well as I repaired the old one. As the old one has a perfect card for managing polys in OpenGL (that is what my DCC software uses) I thought it could be a great idea to buy a GPU that let me play my fav. game in decent res. with decent fps.

What I found is that this card that was supposed to blow arma just cant f****g do it. Whether nvidia or bi gives some feedback or im sending this thing back.

[kklownboy 43]

you are using a CRT ? Some nice Trini? sorry to here its not spitting out 60fps for ya.

Did you set up a profile in the Nvidai Control Panel's 3D settings. and have made sure its multi GPU and Single Display, Vsync on. and most settings to App control? using a renamed .exe.

fear.exe is working for me now. And i set the muti gpu to AFR-1. This is with XP.

[Michael_Wittman 0]

I tryed all that...and nothing works.

[sandzibar 0]

heres what i tried...

latest motherboard, video, sound drivers.

updated XP to sp3

flashed the mobo with latest bios

unclocked in bios back to stock speeds.

messed with cpu voltage on the chance the cpu strain was causing a voltage droop

ran memcheck on RAM to see if they were faulty

renamed arma.exe to fear.exe

disabled SLI on the cards

messed around with vsync, AA, AF and all the other options within nvidia CP.

swapped the GFX cards around to see if there was a fault with one.

removed soundcards to see if that was the issue.

all of the above had ZERO effect. arma still ran like a dog (cod4 and other games on max res, max settings had solid 120fps though). PC crashed lots though so i t went back to vendor for disciplining.

what motherboard you running wittman?

[Michael_Wittman 0]

ASUS Z7S WS MOBO

[Hud Dorph 22]

Have the excact same prob on my inno 9800gx2 - have tried all new drivers - renaming to fear.exe - i went crazy and have given up. All other games run great, but arma = nogo.

Seems its loading textures all the time slowing it down to as little as 10fps no matter what settings used in arma. When i go to Nvidia control panel and set to multi display mode the game runs ok only using 1 of the cards.

[baddo 0]

In SLI the data in the video memory is actually duplicated, according to the SLI documents I read at http://developer.nvidia.com/

Maybe they changed it in newer cards, I don't know. I read an SLI document some time last year.

I understood that there is one dataset for each Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

That would mean there is more data transfer than on a single-GPU card. I do not know if the additional transfer happens only inside the graphics card, but I can imagine it could make sense. One transfer to graphics card, then at the card give the other GPU its data too. Or is it possible for them to separate the data already before the graphics card (there are different rendering modes in SLI so I guess it depends on those too). I do not know, this is speculation.

But it makes sense that the problem might be data-transfer related if you feel that the problem is slow loading of textures.

So a possible cure could be to make sure that the datatransfer speed from Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to Random Access Memory (RAM) and then to graphics card is optimal.

I'm no expert at all on this subject.