Hey. Been reading Bit-Tech for awhile now and I eventually registered for the forums....but never posted anything. Well I now finally do. I got my hands on a 7800 GTX a little while ago but it really doesnt seem to be working. I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Nforce4 mainboard with a AMD Athlon 3500+ and a gig of RAM, allthough since it is dual channel I cant get all 3 sticks to work (One 512 and two 256 sticks) so really only 512 Megs. I have the latest Drivers for everything and it all seems to be plugged in correctly, but in Half-life 2 for example the "recommended settings" are set to medium for most things with trilinear filtering and no AA. If I put everything higher then I get like 100 fps but its VERY buggy and unplayable. I get the same problem with other games as well. (Specifically Battlefield 2 and FEAR).
Not exactly sure what chugging is (feels owned by life) but no they arent artifacts. Also can mention that its a BFG card.
"buggy" doesn't really mean much, we need more info. If you're getting 100FPS you don't mean choppy for sure, but you just said it's not artifacting. Those are really the only two things I can think of that affect gameplay... Put in the two 256MB sticks and take out the 512MB stick if you haven't already. Well, buy two 1GB sticks if you're looking to play BF2 and FEAR, but in any case, you can't have unmatched sticks in dual channel and not have things go wierd (and by unmatched, I don't mean not bought in a matched dual-channel kit, I mean mixed size, speed, timings, etc) Don't skimp on something as important as ram if you're building a system with that kinda horsepower... It could also be PSU-related (ABSOLULTELY don't even consider thinking about skimping there, as that's the only component that can kill itself and others if skimped upon!!!) but chances are you'd just get crashing and general instability if that were the problem.
yea "buggy" wasnt a good explanation. I have a 450 watt power supply and the RAM does all match cept that two are 256 and the other is 512. Right now I am useing both 256 sticks and hope to trade with one of my friends to get the entire Gig working. By buggy i meant. It seems to be very choppy often. as if it needs to load each room. but the framerate never seems to go down for some reason. It just seems to be very choppy. which is odd considering that it says im getting such a high framerate. It seems smooth say 60 percent of the time but I cant go 8 seconds without it skipping many frames. If I just stand there and look around its fine. As for Battlefield, it just seems to be a very low framerate. Even with most settings on medium and low.
I suggest turning off AGP fastwrites. In order to do this, DL a program called Rivatuner, and open the low level system settings. I provided a screenshot for your convienience. http://photobucket.com/albums/v478/Neogumbercules/?action=view¤t=hopethishelps.jpg set it to force off, so it doesnt turn back on every time you restart. hope this helps
It didnt change anything. Also Steam has been acting up. It opens multiple invisible windows that on the taskbar are just blank windows with the steam logo next to it. I also the news window opens every time I open Steam but I cant see anything in it. Been troubleshooting for a few days and im hopeing to get the new hardware up and running. Ive never encountered such problems with a new video card. (the steam problems probably arent related but I just thought I would mention them)
I would suggest monitoring your temps and making sure if there are any overclocks, to restore defaults and see what happens. Open up a game like the FEAR demo or CS:S, get some action on the screen, and then alt-tab out and look at the temp monitor in the nvidia display control panel.
It might be related to the fact that you are having to run with the 2T memory timing and not in dual channel. With no dual channel and 2T, you have about 60% efficiency from 3200MBPS whatever that will be (my head hurts and I can't work that simple math out at this time of day)
Also turn on V-Sync and see if it is any better. It will limit your FPS but it will make it smoother. If it is off then it might make you think it is buggy/choppy.
The temps where all still around 55-60 so it doesnt seem like like its overheating. The Verticle Sync helped alot but it still seems to skip at designated spots. Like I said right before it goes to another room it seems like it needs to load them and has trouble with it or something. Each time it has those skips they are in the same spots. And I didnt really catch what you said Bigz. Not Sure what 2T Memory timing is.
Well, it looks like the problem was just not enough RAM. I traded some sticks with my friend and got the full gig working and everything is running smooth. Thanks for the help anyway everyone.
Basically if you are running 3 sticks of memory with an athlon 64 you will run at the 2T memory timing which is considerably less efficient than the 1T timing. You will see 60-70% efficiency rather than 90-95% from your memory. If you run three sticks of memory you will not have dual channel memory either. Basically, you're getting less bandwidth than is possible if you're running with single channel memory. If you've got two 512MB modules in dual channel, you'll be fine.
Indeed. It's worth nothing though that V-sync doesn't make it smoother, but improves image quality (prevents "tearing"). It doesn't do a darn thing for your minimum framerate (the important one!) and limits your max to your monitor's current refresh rate so to not try and update what's being shown mid-frame and end up with things looking bizarre. From what I've heard, BF2, and probably the FEAR demo, seem to have a 2GB ram "sweet spot". 1GB is plenty for HL2. GB in mixed stuff causing 2T and single channel is probably more of a hindrance than a help for gaming - the lower speed doesn't make up for doubling the capacity. And 512MB really doesn't cut it with that much graphical horsepower. For the record though, I run my ram 2T (I should try 1T again since I've updated my bios, long story) and it's not a big issue. However if I had to run single-channel, I'd be concerned. Unlike on the Athlon XP, dual channel does quite a bit of difference on the A64 (and P4s, but that's been true from the start on that side). I AM planning to upgrade to 2GB in the hopefully near future, because that is becoming almost necessary for the newest games.
