ATI X850 XT AGP 8X Card

[Pianoman178]

I have an ATI X850 XT AGP 8X video card. I'm HUGE gamer, and i just bought this card yesterday. After installing it, i downloaded the newest catalyst drivers from ati's website, and tried playing some games. First game: half life 2. I cranked ALL the settings to high, including AA. I was highly disapointed. In some areas it would go all the way down to 30-40 FPS.

My system:
P4 2.8 w/ HT and 800mhz FSB
1gb Corsair XMS gaming ram
2 WD Raptor HDs, raid 0
Onboard sound

What is the problem with my fps? My cousin says he gets 70-100+ FPS with his settings maxed, but he has an AMD 64 bit. Is the processor bottlenecking me? Is this a driver issue? Please help!

 

[diabloII]

your processor is bottle necking you, but by at MOST 10 fps or so

try different drivers and see what you get

www.guru3d.com you can find other catalyst drivers

 

[beedubaya]

I don't understand why ANYBODY would get an ATI X8xx series card (even though I was a dumb stupid noob and did). You know that card you just bought won't support the new HDR feature in HL2? If I were you, I would return it and get an Nvidia card.

About your problem, HL2 is a CPU-intensive game, so you will notice yourself getting much higher frames if you upgrade your CPU, preferrably to an AMD 64.

 

[uzi9mm]

your processor is bottle necking you, but by at MOST 10 fps or so

try different drivers and see what you get

www.guru3d.com you can find other catalyst drivers

His CPU is not bottlenecking anything. Nowadays games perform only as good as what you got under the hood in the accelerated graphics dept.


Also I would go into your Catalalyst settings and make sure that you do not have your AA or AF jacked to the max. And turn your texture and mipmap detail down a notch. Also make sure you dont have a 30fps cap enabled on HL2.

 

[dhw200]

His CPU is not bottlenecking anything. Nowadays games perform only as good as what you got under the hood in the accelerated graphics dept.


Also I would go into your Catalalyst settings and make sure that you do not have your AA or AF jacked to the max. And turn your texture and mipmap detail down a notch. Also make sure you dont have a 30fps cap enabled on HL2.

I have an X850 XT (dont burn me), running on an AMD athlon 64, and i can crank up half life 2 all the way, as well as doom 3, rome: total war, far cry, etc etc. It is possible ur CPU is bottlenecking u. Half life 2 is more CPU intensive than many other games. one would prolly want at least a p4 3.0 or athlon 64 3000+ (both are high end enough they wont bottleneck anything). It could very well be an FPS cap though.

 

[Trifid]

Half life 2 is very ram intensive to store the textures, but then again you have 1gb.

He has a 2.8ghz p4, it's not worth upgrading 200mhz more, but a little overclock could help alot.

Put the water effects to reflect world.

 

[dhw200]

would reflect world be more demanding?

 

[hercules_upw]

I have no issues running HL2 maxed out.

BTW: nice rig dhw200

 

[Trifid]

reflect all I think is the most demanding. (I can't remember I haven't played it in months.) put it on the one below the top one.

The water is the only thing I have problems running everything max, and I am not really bothered about it.

 

[dale5605]

I don't understand why ANYBODY would get an ATI X8xx series card (even though I was a dumb stupid noob and did). You know that card you just bought won't support the new HDR feature in HL2? If I were you, I would return it and get an Nvidia card.

About your problem, HL2 is a CPU-intensive game, so you will notice yourself getting much higher frames if you upgrade your CPU, preferrably to an AMD 64.

wow, what a nvidia fanboy. Umm, yea thanks for your help in solving this guys problem you retard. That card will get frickin way higher fps than that and will own any stupid nvidia card out there, so why don't you just stfu then.

AT poster, do you have the latest catalyst drivers? These would be version 5.4. I would recommend you get the ones with the catalyst control center. Also make sure you have microsoft .NET framework 2.0 beta.
Then run the catalyst control center. I could give you a few example settings and see how that does performance wise.

put AA on 6X
AF on 6X
mipmap textures on high quality
catalyst AI on Advanced
Truform on application preference
vertical refresh on Always Off

then in the API Specific settings try these:

Direct3D:
Enable Geometry Instancing - Check
Support DXT texture formats - Check
Alternate Pixel Center - Not checked

OpenGL:
Triple Buffering - Not checked
Force 24-bit Z-buffer depth - Not checked

Lastly, Enable all VPU recover options and enable catalyst Overdrive


And bear with me here because I am not familiar with counter-strike but any vsync and fps caps make sure all of those are disabled. Also if there is an option for compressing lightmaps make sure that is disabled.
And I'm not sure if you can do this on counter-strike but on the game I play I am able to set the cache size (though I do have to go into the .ini file to do this). I would set that to 128MB for best performance.
:beard:

Also try reading this half life 2 optimization guide:
http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/half_life_2_optimization/

Oh and btw, I just looked at some benchmarks, for maxed out settings those are normal fps. I don't know what you're expecting but those are a lot higher than if you had a nvidia card.