I was having some huge performance problems playing Call of Duty 2 and Age of Empires III with my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I downloaded the latest drivers, had the latest version of DirectX, and had everything turned off on my machine (Virus Scan, Datakeeper, etc). Not only was it bad performance, but often the machine would completely lockup and I’d have to manually reset it. To play Call of Duty 2 without performance problems I had to turn anti-aliasing off and turn the resolution down to 800×600. I realize the 9800 Pro is not a new card, but with a gig of RAM and 2500+ CPU, it should not be that bad.
I decided to uninstall my drivers and reinstall them from scratch, and booya! It worked. I’m back up to 1024×768 with anti-aliasing at 2X. So, if you’ve installed your new drivers over your old drivers and are experiencing performance problems, it is definitely worth a try to uninstall the drivers and then install the latest ones.
In the process of fixing this, I did consider upgrading my machine since it has been a year since I’ve done any upgrading. If I were to upgrade my graphics card though, I would have to also upgrade my motherboard to one that supports PCI-Express graphics card, and upgrade my processor to one that is supported by the motherboard (AMD 64). That’s about a thousand dollar upgrade, yikes!
Bojan
Yeah, with ATI cards (dunno about NVIDIA), it is always a good idea to completely uninstall the drivers before installing new ones. They used to say this right at the driver download page, and at the start of install instructions as STEP 1, but for some reason had stopped a little while ago. They also have some driver cleanup util somewhere at the site, but I always just unisntall them from Add/Remove Programs thing.
That’s a good card, even if its old. You should maybe try upping the resolution once. I play all games at 1280×960 (or something). I play CS:S with everything high and 2XAA, and usually have fps of 60-110. Although sometimes it dips down to 40 and even high 30 sometimes if theres lots going on or there are reflections and water and stuff. I’d say I used to have a little better performnce in CS:S (prolly an average 70-90), but I think they broke it in all the patching they’ve done to the game. I do have 3200+ CPU though.
November 28th, 2005 at 7:07am
ChadL
Yea, I pondered the upgrade as well and the cost quickly passed the thousand dollar mark. Then again, I’m still making due with my PC from 2001. Yikes eh? I’ve just found no relative benefit (at least for me) to shell out cash for an upgrade that is rather marginal.
For most, the biggest benefit is more RAM and/or an upgraded video card. I chose the display first as my PC is mostly just for work and nothing beats a 24″ Dell display. Uhh, maybe the 30″ apple cinema display.
The reality for me, I’m waiting around for Vista to be released (next year?) and _then_ I might make the move.
December 6th, 2005 at 1:30am
D-Ride
The nVidia 6800GS just released in an AGP version, and it’s quite a step up from the 9800pro without breaking the bank ($200)
January 30th, 2006 at 1:12pm