hi! i have an an intel celeron 2.4ghz with 512 mb ram. i have upgraded my graphics card from geforce4 mx to ATI Radeon 9600 256mb ram. when i play games such as Half-life 2, i can see that the graphics have improved like lighting
, shadows etc, but the FPS is still slow and its basically quite the same as it was with the geforce 4 card. how can i improve the FPS rate to get HL2 to run at least with 26 fps. thanks!

btw this is how my graphics card looks like:

http://www.buyxg.com/images/VC/VC-105-184.jpg

all help is greately appreciated!

In half life 2 you can go to options, then video, then advanced and turn some of the settings lower, or off. Like antialiasing, you don't really need that with that graphics card. Tell us what the default settings were too, I'm interested to see what Half Life 2 thinks your card can handle. This link here can also help you understand what you can turn lower/off for Half Life 2. Hope this helps.

The reason it likes that is that it is low end card. You aren't going to get a huge inprovement from it. Sry to be the one to tell you.

In hl2 Im get 200+ fps with aa 4x and setings high

(Note: you get what you pay for)

For christmas I got my 7800gt ALOT OF $$$$$

but since gamming is my favorite hobby I have invested in it

Sry to be so rude, but it's true.

Also maybe you're new card isn't getting power from the psu.
Post how many watts you have on the psu.

A 9600 adds performance, but most of that performance is absorbed with DirectX 9.0 features + adds a bit more taxation to your cpu/memory performance. This is why you saw so little overall performance improvement, but game details/effects saw measurable improvement.

You can take advantage of the performance improvement in HL2/Source Engine games if you simply revert the game back down to DX7.0/8.0 level so it'll run with the same features your MX did. You can do this in the console with:
mat_dxlevel 70
(for dx-7.0 level)

or

mat_dxlevel 80
(for dx-8.0 level).

You'll have similar looking visuals to what you had prior, but the extra performance your 9600 affords can then be enjoyed... rather than all consumed (and them some) by newer graphical eye-candy/features!

Is it the 9600XT, or just a 9600?

The XT was a pretty good card in it's time - I used to have one and it played UT2004 at max everything 1024 x 768.

Try giving your PC a good cleanup - run Disk Cleanup, Defrag, and a Spyware scan, that certainly won't hurt.

Maybe try turning down some of the eye candy on the games, make sure you have the latest Drivers - I found these good
http://www.omegadrivers.net/

I just saying don't ask to much from this card.


I had a readeon 92xx 256 (I forgot what the nubers in the xx are)

Wich tackeled Battle Front with no problem.


but for newer games no. Also these cards may support DX9, but were not made for it.


Like previsly suggested turn some settings down


How many watts is you're psu???? It may not be getting enough juice.

ok thanks guys. i really appreciate ur help!

Don't forget that hardware such as RAM amount and Hard Drive speed play a huge factor in FPS.

Also a celeron isn't going to cut it as far as gamming goes. Your video card is plety powerful enough to run HL2 at decent settings. i just think that it's getting bottlenecked from the celeron.

I agree, celeron processor is the worst to run High Performance Games like FPS, 9600XT is a good video card I still use mine and runs great but i have a P4 3.4Ghz, I really suggest for a gaming machine to invest more in MOBO and Processor, tell me about it, I just upgrade my old MOBO (ECS 848-p) to ASUS P4800E Deluxe and It really improve a lot of performance, my suggestion is to upgrade from celeron to P4 (HT would be better) if you have socket 478, if you go with 775 and MOBO support Pentium D i heard the Dual cores have improved a lot in gaming tasks. Good Luck!

P4 would be good but going AMD would be better for gamming. I'm not sure what your budget is or if you have one at all but AMD would give you a lot better performence and plus they run a lot cooler that the P4. I have a P4 3.0 and it runs at like 57c idle...It works fine for gamming but i wish i would have gone AMD which would have added on an extra 10fps or so.

Like i said before you video card is fine it's just your Cele thats dragging it down. Also getting another stick of 512 RAM would not hurt either but i would focus on the proc/mobo first.