These new ati cards..the 95/9600 and 97/9800 video cards need a newer
motherboard to work properly. We just yanked out an old Asus mb out of my
son's box(he has an ati 9500 pro) and put an 8xagp capable Abit Nforce2
motherboard. Now it's faster and the plethora of graphic errors he had are
gone...big difference. I wonder what kind of mb sony uses in the Vaio's?
Plus you should take extra care to make sure all your old nvidia drivers
are banished from your system. search for nv*.* and erase or rename those.
There are a couple of programs that also hunt down stray nvidia files...one
for win98 is Detonator Destroyer. I don't know if there are any newer
versions for XP systems.
Finally dig into your video properties and make sure VSYNC is disabled
and your smoothvision is not set very high and your anistrophic filtering
is reduced. you can mess with the video properties to choose performance
over quality...experiment.
dave henrie
Bam, I had a very similar experience when I finally added the last piece to
my puter, an ATI9800 Pro, to replace the aging Ti4200 128m .After
uninstalling the Nvidia drivers and the card, rebooting, installing new card
and it's drivers, and rebooting, ...........nothing. Just black screen.
Uninstall/Re-install, same black screen.....now I'm worried. The stories
I've heard about having to remove any trace of Nvidia drivers must be true,
I had to start in safe mode, do a system restore to get my puter back,
remove the ATI drivers , remove any trace of Nvidia from the registry (I'm
not at all comfortable fooling around in there) and finally, after many
reboots and such, the latest driver.......3.7 at the time......installed and
worked and I was able to see improvement in the fps dept. I've since loaded
the 3.8 Catalyst drivers and they seemed to show an improvement in
Nascar2003 and America's Army, the 2 games I play most, they look great and
I get great frames, but the initial install caused me to smile a little
funny for a while. Especially since the 9800 was $300+ dollars for me.
Good luck tweaking, Ed
At the same time, I've heard a lot of complaints about Sony computers.. From
what I've read, they seem to skim on certain components so they can have
good specs on other components. A crude example would be shit everything,
and fast processor. Then they advertise it as "Sony computer.. 3.2GHz" and
people just see the 3.2.. and they're overpriced as hell. Do yourself a
favour next time, and build your own system to the specs YOU want. Put that
vidcard into a decent computer, freshly installed OS and I guarantee you
won't be complaining about framerate.. at least until a few new games come
out :)
Mike
http://mikebeauchamp.com
I'd go back to basics and consider building a new system around the
radeon. You might be able to use some of the parts from the sony...most
likely just the case.
--
Gerry Aitken
...and a friend shall lose a friend's hammer. - Book of Cyril, chapter
6, verse 16
This e-mail has been scanned for all known viruses by a fish called Colin.
A low-end Athlon64 cpu+mobo is only $600, or $300 for
Barton2500+mobo+big heatsink. They prolly won't fit in a vaio tho :)
rms
87RedVette
D3D is faster than OGL with the ATI cards, but I think the D3D graphics are
also nicer in N2k3 than the OGL, so it's not a loss to switch to D3D.
Regarding the fps difference. First of all - what the others said. You've
probably got to clean out your Nvidia files, and maybe your mobo or even the
CPU really limit the ATI. ATI needs powerful CPUs.
I also wouldn't expect too much of an fps increase when comparing the two
cards at identical settings. When I switched from a GF4-4600 to a Radeon
9700Pro, the Ati wasn't much faster at the same settings. But, I could
increase the resolution one notch, I could set 4xFSAA instead of two, and
8xAniso instead of 4x, and the image looked much nice than with the GF4, and
I still got the same fps. That for me was the main advantage of the Radeon.
Achim
After that is done, you might also try and start up your system in safe
mode, go into the device manager, and check whether there's still any Nvidia
graphics card listed, and delete that as well. Safe mode sometimes shows
devices which aren't shown in normal mode, hence the safe mode startup.
Achim
Yes I've done that Achim. I'll try the safe mode check when I get home from
work tonight. Thanks for the suggestions.
Dan
I would think jumping from a Ti200 to a ATI9600 would be a pretty good
improvement. When I went from my Ti500 to my Ti4600, my frames almost
doubled.
Glen
> D3D is faster than OGL with the ATI cards, but I think the D3D graphics
are
> also nicer in N2k3 than the OGL, so it's not a loss to switch to D3D.
> Regarding the fps difference. First of all - what the others said. You've
> probably got to clean out your Nvidia files, and maybe your mobo or even
the
> CPU really limit the ATI. ATI needs powerful CPUs.
> I also wouldn't expect too much of an fps increase when comparing the two
> cards at identical settings. When I switched from a GF4-4600 to a Radeon
> 9700Pro, the Ati wasn't much faster at the same settings. But, I could
> increase the resolution one notch, I could set 4xFSAA instead of two, and
> 8xAniso instead of 4x, and the image looked much nice than with the GF4,
and
> I still got the same fps. That for me was the main advantage of the
Radeon.
> Achim
> > Remove the GF Ti200 and install an ATI Radeon 9600 pro. Piece of shit.
> Specs
> > are Sony Vaio 1.7 Pentium..512 meg ram..9600 pro.Win XP home. Anybody
with
> near
> > this combo with any advice? I went from 40-65 fps to 25-50 as low as 19.
> OGL
> > slower than D3d.
> > Dan
