right. Following on from the thread here: http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=39002&page=2
I've run into a few technical hitches :groan:
I've recently been having frame rate issues with UT2004, which for my set up should be no challenge really but apparently its become one. It was working fine over the past weekend (which howard will never let me forget ) then for no apparent reason in the last few days fps has dropped off the bottom of 'playable' and has become a bit of a joke.
i've been messing with the settings in the display tab (right-click on desktop>display properties>advanced>perfomance and quality settings) in attempts to rectify the problem and no matter what I do I still end up with low 30's mid 20's fps!! wtf?
meaning with AA/AF wacked right up it seems to make no dent in performance - I tried AA/AF settings all over the place. interestingly I even put them back to where they were as default and the fps went down further still...?! At the very high AA/AF settings fps seemed marginally higher but I could not believe this as it shouldn't be.
I have thought that there could be some sort of bottle-necking effect occuring that if settings are too low it will underperform...and thus needs a bit of AA/AF etc. to set it right. [this could of course be all wrong]
in UT2004 screen res is at 1152 x 864 but even going down to 1024x768 it still went slow, slower perhaps than at 1152! I left all the settings (not in-game ones) at defaulr and tweaked the in-game ones...no appreciable difference, appart from fps going down all the time.
i'm waiting for "slide-show UT2004" when I hit 1fps or lower, lol
i'm wondering if its doing this since the recent updated patch for UT2004 came out. anyone else had this yet? i've not noticed it before I enstalled it but now game noticably hangs - I saw 22 fps pop up numerous times. I have no Idea whats going on all of a sudden, it just doesn't want to play right.
i checked the AGP temp and its 39 resting, 49 under load - no real panic there.
...oh cr*p, I just ran 3dmark03 [i went to get something to eat as I pondered how to further continue in this posting] and its over 1500 marks LOWER than before...no settings changed at all. previous mark was around (just under) 7700, now its 5962. so scratch the idea about the UT patch doing anything funny
So... How on EARTH do I lose over 1500marks, by doing NOTHING to any settings? could the gfx card be faulty causing this periodical decline in performance? - if so is there a definite way to tell, a test I can run etc. [like memtest] that will show up any potential problems?
all of a sudden this hugely expensive thing has become a chain dragging me down - its sad how something like this can affect you but when you spend your hard earned cash (and quite a lot of it) on something thats meant to be top notch...you kind of expect it to be
and just so everyone knows specs are:
AMD64 3000 (90nm winchester, non-o/c'ed)
MSI K8N Neo2 (939, nForce Ultra)
XFX 6600GT (non-o/c'ed)
1 gig corsair ram
2x HDDs (160g 'cuda and 40g Western digital)