Curse

Vrexi · Feb 06, 2006, 09:33 PM // 21:33

Hello, I have an ATI Radeon 9200 128 mb Video card and a 512 RAM.

I auto detected my settings and it gave me high settings, but i am not getting good performance. not bad performance but sort of in the middle. game slowdowns alot too.

I haven't changed any of my Video Card settings ( So its default settings ). What should I change to increase performance?

Also, when I change the graphics settings in options. nothing happens. its the same thing wether its the highest or lowest settings. Do I have to restart the game?

Another thing, my CPU Maxes out to %100 When I open the game, I'd also like to know how to reduce that.

I'm thinking of buying a Ati Radeon 9600 128 mb. I think if i buy this everything will run great( Im sure of it ). but my father isnt buying. So need to know how to increase performance with my own card.

Thanks for all your helps, Vrexi.

Josh · Feb 06, 2006, 09:37 PM // 21:37

Any full 3D game such as GW will suck as much power out of your CPU as it can to run at it's best performance. So that's nothing to worry about.

And I have a ATI Sapphire Radeon 9250, and I can barely run it full quality (no AA as it doesn't support AA it's that freakin' old) with a few mozilla windows open.

Also, a gig RAM would probably increase it a bit but it's just your card that's letting you down.

Also you should notice a difference when your not in a Town/Outpost, go out by yourself somewhere, put it full quality, then move it down to lowest quality. Also you may or may not of noticed but 2 of the graphic options if you go Advanced when you put it to the lowet, not neccessarily everything is at it's lowest.

swaaye · Feb 06, 2006, 10:19 PM // 22:19

Don't bother with a 9600. Buy a AGP 6600GT or X800. If you decide to upgrade.

Vrexi · Feb 06, 2006, 10:23 PM // 22:23

I am getting VPU Recover Error in some of my games, including Guild Wars. How do I fix this...

I was looking at driver options, I saw sometihng called Write Combining, what is this? should I enable it?

I also found a " Fast write " option. The person in the store where I bought told me to disable it for best results. What is " Fast Write " Should I disable it?

Thanks for helps.

j_unit66 · Feb 06, 2006, 10:46 PM // 22:46

you could try to overclock it a bit but do it at ur own risk, you can use atitool, u can get it at guru3d.com or sumting or just google it. make sure it doesnt get over 80degrees tho it could mess up your card and then ur screwed. about buying a new card the sapphire x800 gto(im not sure if its gto) is cheap and can be ocd aaallllooootttt. if your motherboard has it, and most likely doesnt if it is older get a pci-e card they are supposed to be 3x faster than agp8x

Vrexi · Feb 06, 2006, 10:54 PM // 22:54

How do I change my agp Settings?

Josh · Feb 06, 2006, 11:25 PM // 23:25

In the Catalyst Control Center.

Also j_unit, I wouldn't overclock my 9250, let alone a 9200, they don't have fans.

j_unit66 · Feb 06, 2006, 11:40 PM // 23:40

my bad didnt realize they even made cards w/o fans, ok so dont overclock it it will not be good at all fora card with no fan, try upgradeing to the newest drivers and ur agp should be auto the higest ur card can go

Josh · Feb 06, 2006, 11:45 PM // 23:45

Well he could try it if he has enough cooling in his tower already or if he's customly added his own fan to it.

But I wouldn't recommend it, especially on a 9200, I dare try it on my 9250.

ange1 · Feb 07, 2006, 01:21 AM // 01:21

hi josh, i have a 9250 too, but only with 256mb ram

i'm just wondering how long it takes you to zone? it takes me 10 seconds at least with some lag when enemies first cast in a zone

Alias_X · Feb 07, 2006, 02:23 AM // 02:23

I have a 9550, and 256 mb of ram, and a P4 1.7ghz.

In pre searing it is fine, but in post, it takes my upwards a minute to load, and I am not exagerating. The graphics run fine, it really is my ram and processor.

Building a comp with 7800GT, X2 4400+, 2gigs of ram.

SaucE · Feb 07, 2006, 12:23 PM // 12:23

I would recommend a 9800 PRO or better. You will get great performance and great detail. More memory always helps. The less info that has to be cached to the hard drive the better. I think the minimum standard today should be 1024MB.

Some things you can do:

Turn off V-Sync (ATI Control Panel)
Set GW graphics at half and turn off AA. (In GW)
Defrag your hard drive [won't help graphics too much, but can help load zones a bit faster] (Right Click My Computer > Manage; Disk Defragmenter; Select Hard Drive > Defragment)

Josh · Feb 07, 2006, 04:25 PM // 16:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by ange1

hi josh, i have a 9250 too, but only with 256mb ram

i'm just wondering how long it takes you to zone? it takes me 10 seconds at least with some lag when enemies first cast in a zone

Wow 10 seconds? I load places within 4/5 seconds, and my 9250 has 128mb in it.

Vrexi · Feb 07, 2006, 08:14 PM // 20:14

Thanks for all your helps,

And how do i access ATI Control Panel? You mean the catalyst control center? that one doesnt have those settings.

Umm what is AA? Im sorry for not knowing anything.

j_unit66 · Feb 07, 2006, 08:24 PM // 20:24

ati control center came on a cd with my x800, im sure u can just download it off of ati's website, and have you tried updateing your cards drivers?

Josh · Feb 07, 2006, 08:31 PM // 20:31

AA = Anti-Aliasing, gives things a more smooth-edge.

ATI Catalyst Control Centre, if you look in the "smartGART" option it does.

If you don't have Catalyst Control Centre, go to www.ati.com - and go on the Driver Downloads and get the latest 6.1 drivers.

Rayea · Feb 07, 2006, 09:25 PM // 21:25

you should also bear i mind that afaik, the ati 9200 is only dirX9 software and is still dirX8 hardware version.....

might not make much of a difference....
also, u might wanna try playing the game with everything else you can close off being shut down....sometimes a simple thing like leaving msn messenger in the taskbar and running can upset some PCs....mine gets...twitchy....if i leave easy cd creator's createCD and project selector running when i play GW...

a friend set his game to a slightly higher screen res, and got a smoother game, he said it was because at the smallest screen, it was trying too hadr to show everything up in close detail, but at the next setting up, it didnt have to pay so much attention to detail....might work, you never know....

Nazo · Feb 09, 2006, 12:28 AM // 00:28

9200 was a weakened 8500. 9250 is a peice of crap (sorry, just being honest) that was designed so slow that they had to name it the next thing up from the 9200 that already existed. In both cases, they have very limited systems and their memory bus sucks. This is probably the key thing killing you on load times and such. Doesn't so much matter how much memory as the fact that data isn't being transferred quickly to/from memory.

BTW, FSAA has been around since the Geforce. The 9250 is not "that old." If it has no FSAA it's because ATI intentionally decided to explicitely disable it. I find that hard to believe though because that'd just be dumb. I might add that I've used a 9200 SE (the se unofficially means sucky edition because they limited the memory bus even further to make it cheaper) and was able to use FSAA in a few rare games that need practically no power like UT2004.

Generic tips on increasing graphics performance:
-Lower game quality settings. In this case, I'd say try something towards the minimum despite the autodetect.
-Lower game resolution. 800x600 is a general rule of thumb, 640x480 if you can tolerate it.
Increase available system resources (close unnecessary programs/etc.)
-Tweak AGP aperature settings in bios if using an AGP system (I bet you are) - the usual rule of thumb is around 128MB for most cards if you have 256MB of memory or more, and if you have a higher performance card and 512MB or more, an aperature of 256MB may help you.
-Ensure options such as AGP 8x mode (or highest your system can do,) as well as features like AGP write/read are enabled in the control panel as well as your bios. (In some rare cases, disabling rather than enabling such options helps instead. Try both.)
-Try fast writes both on and off - sometimes one helps where the other does not
Overclock the video card (you can overclock without a fan, it just means you can't overclock quite as much.) ATITool is a handy utility to ensure a 100% stable overclock. (Do not overclock beyond what ATITool declares stable.) Whatever overclock produces no reboots or artifacts is acceptable. Most games will not push a video card as hard as ATITool will either (think of it as Prime95 for video cards.)
-Overclock your CPU and memory (this is often the same thing as a lot of systems don't have enough memory ratios.) Lower memory latencies (a 2T command rate timing is going to hurt performance for example.) Note that increasing memory voltage can help and very very few systems can set a high enough voltage to harm memory (most are designed to not fry until around 3.6V and even the hottest out there won't tear up at 2.9V, which is the highest you'll see on an ordinary motherboard.) On nForce 2 systems, set the TRAS memory timing to 9-11 even if your memory can manage lower. I think usually 11 comes out best, but, test to see (SiSoft Sandra will give you a good idea of memory efficiency.)
Get your FSB higher if possible (or, for Athlon64 users, HyperTransport should be a minimum of around 700. You won't actually notice much beyond that on modern hardware and games even in benchmarks.) Remember, AGP needs to remain at 66 or, a few buggy systems require you to set 67 since they won't lock the AGP until you change it. Raising your AGP can occasionally produce very very slightly higher performance, but, has been known on NUMEROUS occasions to cause not so slight damage to video cards. The 1% increase in performance isn't worth the cost of a new video card.
-Get your CPU fast enough. On an AMD, this means around 2.2GHz or higher (AMD's PR system makes it harder to determine this -- don't go by the number they show with a plus next to it.) For Intel, it depends on which P4 you use. I'd say try to get 2.8GHz if possible. Below these speeds, even a good video card is going to be limited in it's capabilities by your CPU, though I'm not sure it'd have a huge effect on a bad video card. Low resolutions tend to be CPU limited before video limited though, so removing as much CPU limitation as you can probably would help.
-Don't use slow memory. You'll see a HUGE difference between, say PC-2100 and PC-3200 memory even though the difference between 133 and 200 doesn't sound like a huge sum. DDR2 is higher latency, so if you have DDR2, don't expect super-fast performance automatically. DDR2-533 can actually be outperformed by a high performance PC-3200 (in particular, watch out for UTT CH5 chips on systems that can set good memory voltages -- those babies go up to 275MHz at low latencies...) There's a tradeoff and you have to strike a balance when it comes to latencies and speed, and often a higher speed will perform better than lower latencies, but, sometimes lower latencies make all the difference in the world. In either case, I should add that if you have a command rate timing of 2T instead of 1T, your memory looses about 25% efficiency to that alone.
-Also, play around with PCI and AGP latency settings (PCI-E has no latency, but, the PCI latencies on such a system can still affect performance.) Usually people find they have to raise latency on the video card because it's grabbing resources too quickly that things like the soundcards need. I got my best performance around 144 or 128 for my video card, 32 for the soundcard, and max for just about everything else. ATITool can set the video card's latency, which is the most important thing, but, not anything else. There is a program called PCI Latency Tool I think which can control all of them, but, it never worked 100% right for me (has issues with the automatic startup.) ATITool set to control video card latency alone seems to work best for me. You'll have to just play around and see what numbers seem to perform the most smoothly (bad numbers will cause games to start jerking and such usually while good numbers smooth them out to some small extent.)

Don't be scared of overclocking, just be careful. I've been doing it since the late 90s and the only times I've broken things so far was when I got careless and tried things I knew better than to try (such as by raising my video card's voltage.) Anyway, I may have listed a bunch of generic methods, but, they apply here as well as anything else. Sometimes with overclocking and tweaking a low end system can be made to last longer than originally intended and play games more tolerably than expected.

Failing all that, well, time to buy new hardware.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rayea

a friend set his game to a slightly higher screen res, and got a smoother game, he said it was because at the smallest screen, it was trying too hadr to show everything up in close detail, but at the next setting up, it didnt have to pay so much attention to detail....might work, you never know....

Nope. My guess is he has the high-quality low res enabled for LCDs. Around a year ago I noticed nVidia added an option for LCD users to increase display quality of low resolutions on an LCD. What this essentially does is it resizes the video with a quality algorithm (probably still bilinear, but, a better bilinear) up to the LCD's native resolution. This way you don't get the horribly crappy resize that most LCDs do (I never knew a resize could be so ugly until I saw my first LCD at low res.) I'm just guessing that this is the issue, but, it sounds suspicious. I can tell you that it's not about the game trying to show things in a different detail or it noticing things any differently. That's not how 3D acceleration works. Speaking of which, you LCD users should use native resolution whether or not such an option is enabled. If you have to lower certain settings like FSAA, it's probably worth it. Just to get rid of the ugly resize most LCDs do, it's usually worth it. I will admit I've seen a few newer LCDs that had a resize so good that they ALMOST looked as good as a CRT can do at lower resolutions though. If you have one of those, you're set. Can't hurt to check native resolution and ensure you don't have one of the monitors with an ugly resize if you don't know though.

Josh · Feb 09, 2006, 04:28 PM // 16:28

I have no problems at all with load times on my 9250 or graphic distortions, everythings perfect...