Hello all, this is my first post! I have built my own pc 6 months ago for the first time! WOOHOO! in my life, and it works prefect! not bad for a newbie! I have: P4 3.2Ghz HT Northwood Motherboard ASUS P4P800-E WD 250GB WD2500JB-00GVA0 parition C:/ 100GB D:/ 150GB BFG GeForce 6800 OC 128MB 2GB RAM = 4xCorsair DDR-SDRAM PC3200 - 512 MBytes WindowXP Pro Srvice pack 2 I play games such as BF2 and HL2 w/ all the source games, but i am having trouble of the smoothness. I play DODS most of the time, but when i turn on HDR, the graphic of the game is so choppy. Sometimes the graphic is smooth but sometimes it's a killer (no matter if i turn on HDR or not, sometimes it ok w/ HDR on). When i look at some object that has more details, it lags (especially water). At first, i thought i didn't have enough memory, so i bought an extra 1GB, but it helps only a little bit, now i am thinking if my HDD is not fast enough? do u think so? what's wrong? And when first BF2 came out, it lags like hell, then they fixed all the bugs and stuffs. now i can play BF2 smoothly but sometimes, the graphic chops alittle, anyone knows why? Oh by the way, not just the graphic is choppy, the sound is choppy too. And when i press console, it choppyly shows up! (DODS w/ HDR) THANK YOU!
Im guessing a combination. Starting with your processor being too slow. The 3.2 Ghz northwood Pentium 4 is not exactly fast by today's standards; it is eclipsed by the Athlon 64 by a great degree in games. A new graphics card however would probably help more so; games like that require much more RAM on the card, especially stuff faster than GDDR 1. A 7800 GTX would set you straight, but in the meantime, just decrease the texture resolution.
i would put it down to the GFX card for those games yo do really do need 256MB on the card. i've got an X800 pro 256MB and the GPU gets stomped on by the 6800 GPU but the ammount of memory (especially cause its GDDR 3) means i can switch on all the eye candy even on HL2 lost coast all i have to lower from full is 'wait for v-sync' and after that i get a playable frame rate. that processors not the problem not really one of my other comps has a 3.0Ghz Presscott HT 630 (addmittedly it is the the version with 2mbit L2 cache) but i play the same games and it handles them just fine. oh and the GFX card in that rig is a PCI-E X600 128MB
