Geforce2 Mx400 performance problems

[Firebird]

Hey, I'm having trouble with my Geforce2 Mx400 64mb agp card. It is extremely slow when drawing smoke or anything with a great deal of pixels. When drawing smoke, the framerate in my games drops at least 30FPS! This goes for any game that i play. I have a PIII 450, 384 mb ram, and i'm running windows 98. Is there any way to smooth out the framerate?? The card has sdr memory. Would that be the reason for the slow smoke??

 

[BrownPaper]

what games are you playing? your computer may not give you the best performance with the newer, graphically intensive games. if you want to run newer games with better performance it would cost you a lot of money (for new hardware or computer).

try lower the resolution that you play at and make sure you disable anti-aliasing and aniostropic filtering. also disable vsync.

 

[Didou]

Well I think it's simply the card having a hard time copping with what you're asking it to do.

I remember Smoke Bombs in CS ( not really the latest game out there ) used to make my GeForce2 GTS slow down to a crawl & the MX400 is much slower then that card.

On the other hand, if you upgrade your VGA card, it will certainly be your CPU/Mainboard that will hold it back. Does your board support faster CPUS ? Something like a P3 733/800 would help it a lot & then you could get a faster card like a GF4MX card & have better framerates.

Or you could always get a completely new system.

 

[Firebird]

I mostly play Medal of Honor Allied Assualt, Nascar Racing 4 , Nascar Thunder 2003, and Hard Truck2. The thing that gets me is that i had a Geforce2 mx 400 earlier this year. It burnt up and i had to replace it. The card i have now is a Geforce2 Mx400 and it is slower than what i had before. Would increasing my cpu to a p3 600 help?? My motherboard is an ASUS P3B-F . I think it supports cpus up to 1 giga hrz. But i'm not sure. Does anyone out there know if it supports a 1 gigahertz cpu?? Also, I have turned off the anti-aliasing and the v-sync. I don't know what else to do.

 

[Didou]

Originally posted by Firebird
The thing that gets me is that i had a Geforce2 mx 400 earlier this year [...] The card i have now is a Geforce2 Mx400 and it is slower than what i had before.

Both are the same card unless you're talking about a GeForce MX4000.

 

[SNGX1275]

Perhaps he's not running the same drivers as he was before.

 

[Firebird]

The first card I had was a Geforce2 Mx400 with DDR ram. The Card I have now is a Geforce2 Mx400 with SDR Ram. Would that make a difference in my framerates??

 

[Didou]

Well, at the time of GF2MX cards there were two variants. Those with SDRam & those with DDRam. It wasn't the same DDRam you'd find on the high end GF2 GTS since MX cards were supposed to be budget cards.

The only use of DDRam on these cards was to allow them to use less traces as they would set the memory with 64-bit pathways to the CHIP instead of a 128-bit pathway with SDRam but in the end both had the same performance ( 64bit DDR = 128-bit SDR ).

Like I said, I think your card is simply chocking with the fog/smoke effects, I don't think your previous card was able to handle it any better.

 

[Firebird]

Would the framerate be better if I upgraded my CPU? I think i might be able to get a pentium 3 1 ghz?

 

[Didou]

Are you sure your motherboard supports that CPU ? It needs to be a revision 1.04 board. It doesn't mention if the 1GHZ P3 that it supports has a 100mhz FSB or 133. If it's a 133MHZ FSB part, you will probably need PC133 Ram to go with that ( PC100 will not work ).

If that is the case, yes your system will run faster, load times will be shorter, AI & physics might not make it chug as much as before but tasks that are limited by your VGA card will still be limited by your VGA card.