Battle with nvidia card, I'm losing.

drivehard454

Thanks, I did switch the option of graphic adaptor priority from [PCI,AGP] to [AGP,PCI], seemed it would make sense at the time. And I did set the Aperature to 256MB. Also, I am not using the #3 PCI slot. So, those have already been eliminated.

I am going to try to delete the nvidia driver again. I am going to just delete in device manager. I will boot up again and see what developes. The card should go in a default mode, right? Or will my ATI drivers download and take over because there is none for the nvidia card? I have noticed on previous attempts that when Nvidia drivers is not listed in device manager then there is an ATI driver listed.

I am going to try anyways tomorrow and see what developes. I may install the newest driver again and see if it works, and if not go back to the 84.21.

Thanks for the advice again.

drivehard454

Any other ideas? I uninstalled my game and reinstalled it. Made sure I had directx9. I tried to play the game again. It is stiil the same. It plays ok, but when there is a lot of action going on, it slowed down. I also get a wavy look, once in a while, like looking through a heat wave.

I played the game anyways for about half an hour, and it locked up again. Like it was doing originally. The screen locked up for about 30 seconds, then the computer shut down and restarted. I tried the game again and it locked up after about 20 minutes. I decided to unistall the nvidia drivers(84.21) and try the newest version again. It did seem to perform slightly better, ever so slightly, but would still skip a little in heavy action. So far it hasn't locked up.

Am I out of options here? I am only running 512 RAM right now, would this have an effect? Also, my old HD is 7200 RPM and my new one that I installed the new OS on is the slower 5400. Does this affect speed while playing games, or am just grabbing at things now?

Is there a way to to a diagnostic test on this card to see if maybe there is something wrong with it? Sucks too because I don't think I have the reciept for it anymore. I would just send it back, although it has been over two months now, they probably would take it back anyhow.

Thanks

BWX

Are you sure? what month version DirectX is it? At this point I doubt that is the problem though, but it is good to have everything up to date.


Also just having 512mb of system ram, and a slow (by today's standards) video card, you are not going to be able to run most games with much antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. The in-game GFX settings could be different from what you had them "before".. have you gone over every single one of them? Do you know what they all were set to before- when apparently it was faster?

It seems like you are just suffering from a slow video card by the sounds of it- or maybe before, when you though it was faster, you just had different settings in the vid card control panel.

Seems your whole driver system might be hosed on your rig from not being careful with DC too.. and that may be hard to recover from if you don't have all the correct drivers installed.

It's pretty hard to know the state of your PC by reading through your posts too.. I thought you had 1GB of system ram, now you say only 512? What happened to the rest?

drivehard454

Yea, I felt real stupid when I found that out about the RAM. I was given the sticks from my brother, about 6 months ago. He put them in and I mis-understood him. I thought he said he gave me two 512 sticks, instead it was two sticks equaling 512. You know, I never had any problems with the computer and never bothered checking what RAM was on the computer properties window. After all this stuff going on, the other day I happened to look and I saw the 512 twelve and got freaked out. I checked the cards, called my brother and he was like, "I told you that!" Well anyways that is why I am saying I only have 512.

Thanks BWX. I think everything is is good working order now on the PC. You may be right, after thinking about it, and what you said, it may very well be possible that before just seemed soo much better, since I was used to playing with the integrated ATI. The problems I had before all the troubles started was it locking up after only a few minutes of playing. It did seem to have no trouble.

Guess there is nothing else to do.

Thanks for everybodies advice and help.

BWX

Well, you could always upgrade.. LOL, and continue to tweak, and read up on how to optimize certain games, etc.. But yeah, I think that 512mb ram is probably hurting you, as well as the slow video card, One thing you could do is turn down the video card settings to medium or performance.. and just play the games.


This is a good site to learn about tweaking games:






http://www.tweaktown.com/cat/guides/index.html

looks like that site has changed immensely since a few weeks ago- looks like it has been taken over by an ad machine and a web-store- not sure- but go down to where you see this list below and start reading up- there is a lot to learn from those guides that can help out.


Guides: Archive
2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | All
Articles listed in chronological order.
ALL archived articles for Guides [55 Articles found]
Data Backup Guide – Online and Hardware Solutions Examined
2006 Holiday Shopping Guide: Building a high-end Gaming PC!
Playing DivX and Xvid content on Xbox 360 – An easy guide!
Intel Core 2 "Conroe" Memory Settings Guide
Gadget Guide #1 – February 2006
Beginners Guide to installing Windows
PC Security Guide – Protection from Viruses, Attacks and Spyware
WinXP Tweaking: Protecting your PC from the outside world
Spyware and Adware Removal Guide – Speed Up and Free your PC
Microsoft Windows XP SP2 - Installation and Tweaking Guide
The definitive guide to benchmarking with DOOM 3
The Simple Antialiasing and Anisotropic Guide
Gizmos, Gadgets and Goodies Guide #4
ATi Catalyst Installation Guide
Gizmos, Gadgets and Goodies Guide #3
Gizmos, Gadgets and Goodies Guide – May 2003
Gizmos, Gadgets and Goodies Guide – April 2003
WinXP Tweaking: From Relax to Righteous
Game Music Extraction Guide
Battlefield 1942 Tweak Guide
System Optimization Guide for Gamers
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 Tweaking Guide
Unreal Tournament 2003 Tweak Guide
PC Buyers Guide - October 2002
AMD Overclocking Guide - October 2002
Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Tweak Guide
America's Army: Special Forces Tweak Guide
Windows XP SP1 – Updating Tips ‘n’ Tricks
PC Buyers Guide - September 2002
Obtaining DDR333 from EPoX 4G4A+
WinXP Tweaking: From Reformat to Relax
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Tweak Guide
PC Buyers Guide - July 2002
Beginners Guide to Overclocking nVidia Video Cards
Creative Audigy Drivers - Installing without the CD
PC Buyers Guide - 11th May 2002
nVidia Graphics Tweaking Guide
PC Buyers Guide - 29th April 2002
Heatsink Theory Guide
Windows XP Upgrade Guide
BIOS Tuning Guide
Windows XP Home Networking Guide
Tweaking Windows XP Part 2
Tweaking Windows XP - Part 1
Windows XP Activation
Broadband Connection Tweaking Guide
Registry Guide
AGP4x + VIA Chipsets Fix
Basic BIOS Tweaking Guide
WinME System Tweaking Guide
WinME Modem Tweaking Guide
Monitor Tweaking Guide
Intel FSB Overclocking Guide
AMD Overclocking Guide
Detonator3 6.50+ OCing

drivehard454

Well, as I stated a loooong time ago now, I probably never would have even bothered upgrading. I was just messin around on ebay one day and there was only like 10 min left on this card at $25.00. I quick looked it up and got the regular price and specs and decided to throw another bid in, The other bidder bid and I waited till the last possible second and threw out a $35.50 bidand won.

I was in the middle of playing GTA SA that my brother had borrowed to me and was really enjoying it. So I got excited to be able to play with better performance, the video card more than meets specs.

I will read up on what you just sent. I love to learn new things anyhow, and maybe I will get some extra cash and get another stick of 512 and a better video card. We are thinking of getting another computer. My wife needs one of her own for the work she does. This one is over 4 years now since I built it, I know it's time to upgrade. Problem is, I can't convince my wife to use this one, specially now after everything I was going through. I have been pricing components on NewEgg and I think I can build a pretty nice set-up for $800-900. She wants to buy a store bought rig.

Anyways thanks BWX I will look up the site you recommended.

drivehard454

Back again. I went to the link you posted and there is a lot of information on how to tweak the performance of a nvidia card. Problem is it is all very outdated, and the steps I am sopposed to take, are not found with the newer nvidia control panel, or with the windows xp.

It talks about changing Mipmaping, and I cannot find it anywhere in the control panel. Same with the openGL, I cannot find options there either. It talks about version 28.32 nvidia driver and I believe that was a long time ago.

Also, what are VIA 4 in 1 drivers? I am not finding good information on that if I can benefit from downloading.

What is coolbits registry for overclocking. It describes the process but not what or how to use or get coolbits?

http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/249/...ion/index.html

Thanks

BWX

yeah via 4 in 1 are like the chipset drivers you already got for your board.. Coolbits is just a way to OC your video card and get a little extra performance out of it.. You have to be careful when doing that though, and not go overboard.

Yeah it looks like some of those guides are kinda outdated, but most are still worth reading through, like the Windows XP guides etc.. The game individual game guides are the best part though. If you are playing any of the games he has done a guide on, it's definitely worth a look.

drivehard454

I didn't notice the guides on the games. I will look into it too.

I may not attempt to do any overclocking anyway. But I would like to try the other steps that were stated in getting a little better performance, the steps are not the same between the guide and my particular set-up. Maybe the newer drivers already have the settings set to maximize performance?

Oh well, I came to the conclusion that I may need to get another 512 DDR anyways. The game seems to play with fairly good performance and quality until there is a lot of action on the screen, then slows down. Now That I realized I am shorter on RAM than I thought it kind of makes sense.

Thanks again BWX

cozumel

BTW, if you only got 512MB DDR I'd go back into the BIOS and turn down the AGP Aperture Size to 64MB until you get more DDR then you can tuen it back up!!

drivehard454

OK, if I may, what does doing this step accomplish?(cozumel)

While researching and reading up on ways to gain performance I ran into a step that stated to run the AGP Aperature double what the video card MB is. In my case, it is 256MB so I turned it up to 512MB. Does that only help if I have the higher amount of DDR to to back it up?

I will give it a try though. Thanks for the input.

cozumel

I'm actually gonna have to go and check it 'cos I can't really remember. Pretty sure it uses the system memory when needed to execute some of the graphics so that performance is enhanced. However, depending on how much software and resident programs you have have running you may have too little system memory so it could actually reduce performance. But I'm gonna google now to check...

Edit: "There are two common outcomes from setting the AAS too high: (1) If you share too much RAM with your graphics card and an application takes advantage of that, you will have less RAM for other functions of the software, and possibly for background applications. (2) If the graphics card does not utilize the memory, it is not taken from system memory. In this case, there are no problems with AAS sucking all of your system RAM, despite its setting in the BIOS configuration utility."

The article I got this quote from was written 2002 and games and applications are more memory hungry now. So I would just get concerned it could be slowing things down if you set it high and the games take all the memory from the programs you have running in the background.

So what I advise is to either do a benchmark with 64, 128, 256 & 512MB settings and then compare the scores so you can go with the best.

drivehard454

The only thing that I should have running is my AVG virus control. That should not be sucking anything up. I like to keep a minimum of programs running in the task bar if at all possible.

I will give what you stated a try sometime tomorrow. I'm at work right now. Thanks for the reply back.

drivehard454

Well guys, I finally got myself to the realization that this card just isn't enough. So I startd to play, and adjusted settings to best accomendate performance. It is still a little better thatn the integrated graphics.

I played for about half an hour and all was well when, the game froze! Just like it did originally before I had all the problems with losing my OS. It stayed frozen for about 30 seconds and then it restarted the computer. But I saw a blue scren with a bunch of writing on it. So I started the game again. It played for about 20 minutes and froze, no blue screen when shutting down. I tried again, after about ten minutes, froze, no screen. Si I thought I would try one more time. Same thing, about ten minutes and shut down, this ime the blue screen popped up and I caught a glimpse of "problem caused by NV4-disp. That's all I could get before it shut down.

So now what is that? The only thing that I did this time is ran with the newest nvidia driver. I was told a while back to try the 84.21 driver. I am going to delete the newest drivers again and go back to the previous and see if it still locks up.

Any body here of that problem and any way to fix it?

Thanks for the support.