ATI 1650 PRO PCI-Express not good enough?

[bluejay]

ATI 1650 PRO PCI-Express not good enough?

Hi all,I'm running a machine that's optimised for home studio work primarily but I assumed it would be powerful enough to play this game...How wrong I am.It's a dual core Pentium D 3.4 GHz, 4GB RAM running Windows XP64. The game is running from my C drive which is an 80GB Western Digital SATA II drive with an 8MB cache.My graphics card is a 512MB ATI 1650 PRO PCI-Express, my sound card is an M-Audio Delta 66 (i.e. a recording sound card rather than a gaming card). Having said that, DXDiag finds no problems with any of my hardware for DirectX 9.0c.With this hardware, the game is not even playable on low settings. The frame rate is absolutely appalling (1-2 per second).I've read through the tech hints and upgraded my ATI driver accordingly but still no success.Should I be looking to upgrade my graphics card or could it be something else (such as my sound card or hard disk)? Thanks in advance.James

 

[username_2067007]

Actually, when you get the system you are using sorted out, an X1650 Pro is certainly able to perform better than yours is now. I don't know whether it's a function of the excess VRAM that is onboard the one you have, or if it's possibly either substandard compared to the reference copies, or defective (there was no reference example with "512 MBs" back then).A decent X1650 Pro with the correct 256 MBs onboard should handle the game with medium settings at a medium resolution In case you've managed to avoid learning much about video graphics, a medium card like that one has a 128 Bit memory system that handles blocks of 128 MBs at a time. It can swap blocks in and out and out of 256 MBs of VRAM to use for gaming purposes. I've never heard of any software that can overcome the disparity with a medium card's memory system and speed, versus the 512 MBs that only high performance cards (256 Bit memory) have the capability to use, and that is when high resolutions are being used (1600 x 1200 upward). You need to go over the pinned messages at the top dealing with performance and determine what is wrong with your PC, before deciding the particular VGA you have needs replacing.

 

[bluejay]

Thanks for the info. I managed to get fairly decent response by dropping down the anisotropic filtering. For some reason this doesn't decrease even when you select the 'low graphics' option.Anyway, I've ordered an ATI 3870 XT. I really want to be able to run it on higher settings than this.cheersJames