Geforce 2 GTS = bottleneck?(kinda long)

[Guest]

My system:
1.1ghz Anthlon HP Pavilion 9800
128mb memory
32mb Nvidia Geforce 2 GTS(AGP)
Windows ME
VIA motherboard (Phoenix Technologies 1/19/01)
I have directx 8.1, and the most up to date detonator drivers.

I know this isnt a gaming forum, but I'm trying to decide where my bottlneck is comming from. I have a weird problem thats kinda hard to describe without actually showing someone, but here it goes. Alright I'm playing Clive Barker's "Undying", whenever I walk into a room with a lot of graphical detail, my system will sometimes dip below 20 fps. I'm running the game in 1024x768 all detail on high. Now, in the middle of the action while my computer is chugging along, I go into the options, and turn the "prefered framerate" slider bar to the left or right. I then go back into the game, picking up right in the action, it will pick up 10-15 fps. So I think I have it set right, and I leave it alone. The killer part is though, I re-started that part of the level and go back through that very same part, and it dips back in to the upper teens, chuggin like it did before. So no matter where I put the desired framerate, it will chug along until I go into options move the slider in any direction and go back into the game, then it runs fine. It even does this in 800x600, so I'm thinking that the bottleneck is occuring in the motherboard somewhere. Has anyone ever upgraded the BIOS on their motherboard and found an improvement in gaming? How can I check if its in AGP 4x? I went into BIOS and there wasnt any option for video. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[ejsmith2]

If you're running 4x, fast writes, sidebanding, then your 'weak link' is the gfx card.

 

[Guest]

> If you're running 4x, fast writes, sidebanding, then your 'weak link' is the gfx card

Somehow I have a hard time calling a GeForce 2 GTS a weak link. Yeah they've got GeForce 3s now but it's still a powerful video chipset.

 

[ejsmith2]

That's if he's running all that turned on.

He's got his gfx selections in the game cranked way up, and if you've ever played unreal tourney with volumetric lighting on, you'll know what I mean. I use the GTS myself, and it does good by me. But there's limitations on most of the games, to keep your fps above 30. I assume he's wanting all that detail, and it comes at a price.

 

[noko]

Appears that you maybe running out of onboard texture memory and starting to use the much slower AGP texture memory. Try 16bit and let us know what happens. Plus can you use texture compression and let us know also. Turning up all the detail especially not using compressed textures eats up the onboard ram quick.