Curse

Frozenshadow · Sep 28, 2006, 08:37 PM // 20:37

Ok so i have a Dell 3000 desktop and i have had GW for about 5 months, i played with my integrated 96mb onboard. So anyway i only have pci to work with so i got a top pci card which is a 256 x1300 pci graphics card, but now it doesnt matter weather or not graphics are on highest or lowest. GW is very laggy all the time and ive reinstalled driver and card and no change, if i switch back to integrated it works okay again, but on the card it wont. The card plays everthing else very nice and beautiful. Any ideas?

Mushroom · Sep 30, 2006, 03:27 PM // 15:27

The problem is not the GPU, but the PCI bus.

PCI is only a 66 MHz bus (532 Mb/s). AGP is a pumped-up version of PCI, which has an effective throughput of 133 MHz (1.06 Gb/s).

PCIx is a totally different form of archecture. It can push 250 Mb/s per channel, with up to 16 channels working at once. This give you an effective speed of 4 Gb/s.

What does this all mean? Well, in the case of games like GW, the graphics card (x1600) may be pushing as much as 4 Gb/s, but the PCI bus is only capable of handling 1/8 of that amount of data. Since it can't keep up, it will frequently "throw away" data, resulting in jerky performance. Or it will simply keep trying to run through the buffer as fast as it can, resulting in very slow graphics and performance (lag).

This is the biggest reason why when I recommend upgrading graphics on a PCI only system, never go above something like a GeForce 4 or ATI Radeon 9500 series. Because any improvement you would get would be lost because of the bus performance.

Compare it to buying a brand new Ferrari, to drive 5 miles at 30 MPH to go to the store. You have a lot of potential, but the roads prevent you from useing it. PCI is like a 2 lane surface street. AGP is like a 4 lane divided highway. And PCIe is an 8 lane freeway.

The only way to improve your video performance would be to get a new motherboard that supports AGP/PCIe, and move to an appropriate video card. Myself, I consider it to be a crime to offer such a high-end GPU on a pittiful PCI card.