Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Need to learn a bit about framerates and video options

Johnny Rotten · 08-14-2003, 05:56 PM

Some onboard audio will cut significantly into CPU usage. You may want to consider getting a dedicated sound card. I play games all the time and I've never needed or wanted anything better than a Sounblaster Live 5.1. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is also a good choice. You can get the SB Live for dirt cheap online these days.

Now would be a good time to get a video card to prepare for Half-Life 2, Deus Ex 2, Doom 3, Stalker and other intensive games coming out in the next 3-6 months. IMHO, the Radeon 9600 is the best choice out there for the money. I would not recommend a Geforce FX 5200 or Radeon 9000/9200.

The 5200 is more like an update of the Geforce 4 MX line than an update of the Ti4200, by a long mile. The 9000 and 9200 don't fare much better, although they will try to impress you by loading on a bunch of RAM. The truth is that the card architecture for those particular choices will become a bottleneck long before the amount of RAM will.

I don't see anything else in your system that might be making things slow. If you have Windows XP or 2000, I highly recommend this page for disabling services and freeing up a lot of RAM for games and such. But his page seems to be down at the moment, possibly because of the massive power outage in the Northeast.

08-14-2003, 05:56 PM	#4 (permalink)
Johnny Rotten lost and found Location: Berkeley	Some onboard audio will cut significantly into CPU usage. You may want to consider getting a dedicated sound card. I play games all the time and I've never needed or wanted anything better than a Sounblaster Live 5.1. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is also a good choice. You can get the SB Live for dirt cheap online these days. Now would be a good time to get a video card to prepare for Half-Life 2, Deus Ex 2, Doom 3, Stalker and other intensive games coming out in the next 3-6 months. IMHO, the Radeon 9600 is the best choice out there for the money. I would not recommend a Geforce FX 5200 or Radeon 9000/9200. The 5200 is more like an update of the Geforce 4 MX line than an update of the Ti4200, by a long mile. The 9000 and 9200 don't fare much better, although they will try to impress you by loading on a bunch of RAM. The truth is that the card architecture for those particular choices will become a bottleneck long before the amount of RAM will. I don't see anything else in your system that might be making things slow. If you have Windows XP or 2000, I highly recommend this page for disabling services and freeing up a lot of RAM for games and such. But his page seems to be down at the moment, possibly because of the massive power outage in the Northeast. Last edited by Johnny Rotten; 08-14-2003 at 06:06 PM..