Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (
More info?)
Sham B wrote:
> Yeah. Most of the time I just whap up the FSAA to x4 and stay at
> 1024x768 for this reason. Much nicer than 1600x1200, although the
> purists will disagree, saying I an increasing apparent quality, not
> actual quality.... but hey, its only a game
I tend to play my games at 1600x1200 on a19" Trinitron without AA. To be
honest I haven't played with AA that much, but have found that the best way
to do AA is game dependant. Essentially it is usually worth turning it onto
2x for ATI cards and 4x for GeForce (since 2x on a GeForce has next to no
effect). This helps with edges that appear to creep - usually long straight
edges that are at a low angle (close to horizontal or vertical) and are
moving slowly. AA is essentially a "blur", but I'm under the impression
it's a blur on an oversampled original in order to downsample it to your
actual resolution - in that sense it is better than a simple blur.
There are benefits to both a higher res and AA, I'd say run at the highest
res you can, with 2x AA on - that's gonna be a good starting point.
> Also, Im finding that many games just do not need the processing power...
> many posts imply that my XP2000+ is underpowered, but overclocking it
> tends to result in no discernable increase in responsivness for many
> games...
Well that's game dependant!
> In fact, the only games that tend to really tax the processor
> (lock-on and OFP) dont have a hardcore gamehead following at all, so I
> worder if its all down to bragging rights. The last two games I have
> played (Bloodrayne, Battlefield Vietnam) dont seem to slowdown at all on
> my pokey old system... well, BV does if I specify 64 'bots, but its fine
> for up to 40.
Many games (and modern benchmarks) will top out at your CPU, way before your
9800 Pro is the bottleneck. Other games won't. It seems that unless you
have a 3000+ processor, there's little point in upgrading from a 9800 Pro.
> I *did* see slowdowns in some games, but upgrading the
> memory from 512mb to 1024mb seemed to kill the problem completely
Good.
> (and btw, memory speed seems to be the biggest con of all... overclocking
my
> memory by 40% seems to gain me 5-10% in realperformance!
Did you up your FSB with the memory? If not, how do you expect to get that
extra bandwidth to the CPU? And what exactly is "realperformance" are we
talking in MS Office? Gaming? Video Encoding? Whether or not memory
bandwidth is a concern is highly dependant on your application. Again,
whether or not your CPU is the bottleneck, or your video card, or indeed,
your memory bandwidth is the bottleneck in any situation, depends on that
situation.
> Slow memory is
> already expected and covered in the hardwareby caching, so why bother
> with super fast memory?).
Err... it is offset a bit by caching, not "covered". Well, not unless your
cache is bigger than 512MB, as you have already said that adding more than
that helped. And what exactly IS cache? Fast memory with low latency, and
if that helps, then why not propagate those properties to your system RAM.
Yes it's expensive, but it can, and in many cases does, help.
If you're talking about gaming, then you are chucking a huge amount of data
about, and not all of it can live in the cache.
Ben
--
A7N8X FAQ: www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html
Questions by email will likely be ignored, please use the newsgroups.
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram