rec.autos.simulators

One readme on the ATI cd stated that my motherboard should be using GART
drivers.  Not sure it would have any benefits, but I've downloaded the
latest ones for my k7s5a.  Not sure how to get them installed though, or
whether it's even worth doing.  I read that it has something to do with
dealing with large images when loading from HD, possibly.  Any ideas, or
am I wasting my time?
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How big's the file.  Only on 56k dialup here.  Something else I need to
be spending money on, to upgrade.  Oh well.
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No, they were on offer at a cheaper price, but I made sure that wasn't
what I bought.

Like I said, it has more memory and a faster engine core, but runs
slower.  There's more to these cards than just that I guess.  I know the
number of 'pipelines?' can affect things, and I'm sure there are various
other factors, but I would have thought that the main speed influence
would come from memory size/speed and engine speed.
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Hey, it's worth a try.  :-)
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Peter Ives (AKA Pete Ivington)
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Oh well, if that's the case, then I'm going to have to dust off the CC
by the looks of things and get a new, decent mobo, faster cpu, more and
faster memory and a shiny new G/FX card.  Oooh, the pain!!  :)

Normally, when upgrading I've not made this kind of mistake, and have
managed to go in the right speed direction each time.  Looks like I may
have been caught out for a change.
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Peter Ives

   One other thing you will find, the newer video cards really don't fully
run all their features unless you have a fairly new motherboard.  The
latest drivers for the motherboard are often crucial in getting good
performance from the new cards.  
   When I first upgraded to an ati card, I had a fairly old MB, and on sims
like the ISI products, the cars looked like triangular swiss cheese.  
Texture holes and stretched objects really impacted the view.  Once I moved
to a new motherboard, all those problems vanished.  

   And finally, you will find that many of the medium priced cards perform
very close to the very expensive ones when you use medium to low screen
resolutions.  Only when you upsize your screen or pile on the special
features do you see big gaps in performance.
   Oops...one other item We ALL should have mentioned at the start.  Your
default d3d settings may be waaaay to high.  Go into the ATI settings and
change the d3d sliders from Quality to Performance and you should see some
improvement.  Also turn off Smoothvision and Ansitrophic filtering.  Make
sure the Vertical Synce is turned off.   PLUS!!  A final BONUS tweek.  You
can edit your ini files in nr2k3 to turn off anistrophic filtering within
the sim and get improved fps.  
  Somebody posted a link to a site for Nr2k3 tweeks...is that still around?
(anyone?)

dave henrie

Ah good, because like I said, those cards are ***for ***

The 9000/9100/9200 "non SE" series of cards are based on the old 8500
cards, fairly decent cards when they were new, but nothing stellar, they
performed about on par with a GF3ti card, in fact I still run one in
this very computer and play the odd FPS or strategy game on it

In theory you'd think so yes, but if that was true then AMD would have
been out of business a long time ago as their XP series of CPU's has not
been able to keep up with the Intel P4's on raw CPU speed, maybe the
Xabre cards are the Athlon XP's among vid cards ? :-D

However, back to the topic, if your card is a regular 9200, then I
honestly think you should see a half decent increase in video
performance, the 9200's may be low end cards, but they're not *bad*
cards and certainly they ought to be faster than a Xabre 200, however,
if you can return it, shell out a little extra for the 9600PRO card
instead, which in my opinion is the best value of the mid range cards
right now, it's not as fast as a GForce 5700 Ultra, but a fair bit
cheaper

This one....

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

....is 85 Pounds, on the other hand, if you're going all out, I'd shell
out for the 9800PRO instead, they are on sale now in many places...

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

...at 135 pounds....that's a lot of performance if you can find the cash
for it and will serve you well as and when you upgrade the rest of your
PC as well, ATI is very aggressive on the pricing these days, if you
prefer GForce cards, I'd go for a 5700 Ultra or a 5900 XT or non Ultra

Beers and cheers
(uncle) Goy
"goyl at nettx dot no"

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

"A man is only as old as the woman he feels........"
--Groucho Marx--

Funnily enough, at the time of installing the Xabre card I was putting
together a similar spec computer for my other half, except I used an
Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB pc2100 ram (instead of 384Mb on my computer) and
the GF3 Ti200.  What surprised me was that the Xabre wasn't that much
down on performance to the GF3.  Now, if what you say is true, then the
Radeon 9200 on my system, being that little bit slower, is likely to
also be down on performance compared to the GF3 system which, I guess,
isn't really that far off.
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The TI 4200 was a "budget" or low end version of the 4600...

you can find more out about apples to apples by reading www.tomshardware.com
about GFX cards.

the problem definitely is that the MFG's are hoping you will be confused...
That when "comparing specs" between Gateway or anyone else for that matter,
that you wont know that the 5200 cards are the old "mx" card, or cut
down-performance versions of a family of cards.

I get this happening all the time, friends going "wow, your old p4 2.4 ghz
machine is so much smoother and nicer than my 3 ghz machine," but it turns
out that he bought the 5200 (newest full feature_but lower performance card)
vs mine, wich is the 4600, which was last years (so to speak) highest
performance card...  when My 4600 was newly released, it was $300.  When the
5200 was newly released it was a max of like $175  IIRC.

nvidia has similiar levels but I dont know them as well, so I wont try to
state them wrong here...

Actually, I've just seen online a straight comparison between my 9200
and the Ti4200 and, basically, the Ti4200 kicked the 9200's butt.  Guess
the guy who was claiming his new 9200 outperformed his old Ti4200 was
the ventriloquist's private parts.

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<snip>

Have done that and benchmarks are less than 100 apart now.

Not sure how to do this.  If I remove the x's from the boxes that seems
to make things worse, performance-wise.

Guess that's in the file

rend_dxg.ini

Anistropic filtering = 0

which I guess is off anyway.
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Peter Ives (AKA Pete Ivington)
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PLUS!!  A final BONUS tweek.  You

I assume this is in the rend_dxg and/or the rend_ogl files? Change the 8
to a zero?? (AnisotropicLevel=8)

TIA
JZach

<snip>

OGL worked just fine.  Only trouble was it was ACTUALLY slower than D3D
by about 3 or 4 fps in NR2003.
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Peter Ives (AKA Pete Ivington)
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That is correct, from all the posts I have ever read reguarding the ATI's...
ATI does better with DX, GForce does better with OGL.  The rest of the
visuals are like trying to determine the amount of Soda you add to a shot of
Crown...  your Milage may vary :)

Good - I'm not the only one who saw slower FPS with OGL.  Except mine was a lot
more than 3 or 4 fps slower.  It was more like 10-12...

Eldred
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