fps

[BigJohn]

Hey guys, new too the forum, yet i've been on the site checking out off an on, great job btw Rob.

K Issue:

I just purchased Starcraft II don't flame the game unless yea tried it, cause they did improve quite well with gameplay storyline and multiplayer usage. Amazing details they put into it.

Now my fps sucks donkey nuts..... lame eh the specs :

i have a P4 3.3ghz H/T i know gawd its old lol
3 gigs of ram
3850 HD 512 ram gpu
running O/S win xp

Now even though my computer rawks your socks lets get too the question:

What can i do too this computer without going up and beyond with money too improve my fps too play it as smoothly as possible. Right now i'm running 0-13 fps 13 fps in campaign mode, 0-1 fps in multiplayer mode.

All inputs are thankful, all flames; we'll there just lame ..... peace


Rob you best put an input haha, and when we gonna go ice fishing again man hahaha

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Short answer... not much. I too have an ancient PC and yours is more powerful. I have a P4 3.0 with HT, 2GB ram, Win7 and WinXP, and an HD 3650 (AGP).

You'll find you are completely CPU bound, even if you upgraded to an HD 4670 (assuming AGP), your FPS won't budge. If you drop the resolution, your FPS probably won't budge either. Since you are running WinXP, you'll be running with a couple extra frames anyway, Win7's overhead can be brutal sometimes on an old system. Various service and registry optimizations will be purely lip-service. Only 2 things i can think of (without resorting to a new PC), get a dedicated NIC with TCP offloading, like an Intel NIC, that'll save you about 5-10% CPU cycles (best case, since we are talking old CPUs here, lol) under multiplayer, and the other would be a dedicated soundcard with hardware offloading, like an old X-Fi (if you get a PCI card and don't run under Win7, also, don't get an Xtreme Gamer edition). But even with both a new NIC and Soundcard, the best you could hope for is about 2fps difference, and that'll be under best case scenario.

Only other thing would be to overclock the hell out of that CPU, most topped out at 3.6-3.8 (depending on which P4 edition you have) without decent RAM, but again, we're talking 1-2fps gain. Getting a better GPU won't have much affect at all.

 

[DarkStarr]

You need a new CPU and mobo.... and ram more than likely. Then your performance ought to go up, after than new GPU and PSU are likely next to be upgraded.

 

[BigJohn]

deadly deadly awesome advice, not very good with acronyms but got the jyst of it. Funny thing, i put stacraft 2 launch in Steam and for some reason i'm now running 30-40 fps single player and 15-25 fps in multiplayer can yea explain that too me or is that jus some hocus pocus steam does too games haha

 

[BigJohn]

o an totally random off the chart question. Does win xp only read so much ram i have duel ram 2x1 gig sticks and 2x512mb sticks which is 3 gigs, but my computer is only reading 2556mb of ram odd eh, is there a program that can test which ram is broken if its broken thanks

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

o an totally random off the chart question. Does win xp only read so much ram i have duel ram 2x1 gig sticks and 2x512mb sticks which is 3 gigs, but my computer is only reading 2556mb of ram odd eh, is there a program that can test which ram is broken if its broken thanks

It's only reading that much because WinXP doesn't show you what ram the operating system uses. I have 4GB in this laptop I'm on currently, but it only shows up with 3.6GB total ram on my CPU/RAM monitor program. I have 4GB in my desktop as well, and it shows exactly the amount on here. On Windows 7, it tells you the amount of ram that you have (4GB in my case) but it also puts next to it in parentheses the usable ram available (what's not being used by Windows to run). See in this screenshot next to "Installed Memory" and you'll know what I mean. You don't have anything wrong with your ram. as for the fps thing in SCII, I myself found a framerate boost when I run Crysis through steam rather than by itself, and I have a AMD Phenom II x4 processor. I have no clue what's up, but games run better through steam for some reason.

 

[BigJohn]

Great information thanks for the input its greatly appreciated

 

[Optix]

On the plus side BigJohn, this is the golden age of budget computer building. You can get a lot of horsepower for dirt cheap compared to 5 years ago. If you do decide to upgrade feel free to make a post. Loads of people have different ideas to fit any budget.

 

[BigJohn]

Cool I'll keep that in mind Optix thank you for the advice.

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

On the plus side BigJohn, this is the golden age of budget computer building. You can get a lot of horsepower for dirt cheap compared to 5 years ago. If you do decide to upgrade feel free to make a post. Loads of people have different ideas to fit any budget.

He's right, BigJohn. I mean lots of people think that you have to spend thousands of dollars to get a beast of a computer; you don't. Look at my signature, all that using a newegg promo code for $25 off the GPU, tax and shipped to my house for $812. I can play any game right now, even Crysis maxed out and it's still playable. And you might not be one of those people who wants ultra high framerates to play something (I am ) and in that case you can get a pretty darn good system for around $500. and by ultra-high framerates, I mean playing Half-Life 2 Episode 2 at a constant fps cap of 300fps

 

[BigJohn]

300 FPS OMG that is bloody wicked sick, the possibilities, a computer like that would give me an orgasm every time i turn it on

 

[BigJohn]

as newb as this is, is amd better then intel for gaming now, i know intel use too be the best, but i see more an more amd systems

 

[Optix]

I tend to look at it this way.

Intel for all around performance, AMD for gaming. The reason for that is most games still don't make use of multiple cores and AMD chips usually cost less. If you want all around performance in things like media encoding in addition to gaming you can't beat an Intel.

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

yeah Optix is right. I was going to go with an Intel originally but it would have cost me over $1,000 to get the same clock speeds in a core i7 processor combined with how much more expensive Intel motherboards are. I use the AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE quad-core processor...and I only max it out in Crysis and sometimes in BC2 (but I have settings all the way up, so it's understandable). As for the 300fps, that's exclusive to Source games for me. lol. In maxed settings I usually get 80-120 fps in BC2, 30-50 in Crysis depending on the level, and I have the framerate capped in Black Ops at 75. I am VERY happy with this system, and I do little video encoding so this is perfect for me.

 

[DarkStarr]

Meh that's somewhat true but now thanks to GPU acceleration a lot of stuff (media wise) is/can be gpu accelerated with the right apps. Also AM3 hexacore chips are not all that expensive either, so you could always go that route.