AIW 9600 Questions

Captain_Chunk

Hi,

I recently bought an AIW 9600 128mb DDR card and am so far pleased with it. My only questions are the following:
1) It seems as if my 9600 isnt all that much faster than my old 8500 card. Is there some setting that I need to adjust in order to see a noticeable improvement?
2) Whenever I play Raven Shield and look at smoke, it slows down or if I enable night vision it slows down alot. Now the smoke slowed me down with my 8500 and you can enable low detail smoke which I did. The night vision never messed me up with my 8500 but on my new 9600, using the night vision causes a severe drop in frame rates. How much faster is the 9600 from the 8500 and why am I having slowdowns?

I have the latest catalyst drivers, and all that good stuff. Latest Direct X and my system specs should more than run this card fairly fast....

Pentium 4 2.4ghz
512 DDR
128 MB ATI AIW 9600
Audigy 2 ZS soundcard
80gig HD
(Yes I just defragmented yesterday, no improvement...and it slows down even when the setting is on "balanced quality/performance")

P.S. Star Wars Battlefront seems to have run smoother on my 8500 than th 9600 and I just am sort of frustrated why the 9600 appears to run slower. Am I not configuring it right? I havent gotten any error messages with the 9600 and its super nice card but for some reason I dont see a big frame rate jump or performance increase for the mid-range card that its supposed to be....

dj_stick

use driver cleaner, and re-install the latest drivers

Dyre Straits

I, too, did an upgrade from the 8500 128 MB card to the 9600 series. I have a 9600 Pro 128 in my game system and a AIW 9600 128 in my other system.

I really don't play games as much on the AIW system. I use it mostly for capturing. However, I did see a significant improvement over my 8500. (BTW, that was a really, really good card and is now being used by my daughter-in-law.)

Have you tried making changes to the AGP Aperture setting in the system BIOS? I found that changing that and testing it on each setting will help find the 'sweet spot' for better performance on your particular system.

Also, I found that increasing my system RAM from 512 to 1 GB made a HUGE difference in my overall performance. (This wasn't necessarily true a while back with older motherboards. But, the more recent ones seem to handle it better.)

Finally, I have found that Omegadrive's drivers give me the best overall performance and are visually better. If you haven't tried them, I strongly suggest that you do so.