Increase frame rate for gaming/drivers/general confusion!

[wiseman01]

Hi,

I've spent the last two hours browsing endless internet forums trying to find a solution to increase my frame rate. Although I'm not foreign to computers etc, I am out of my depth when dealing with graphics! So I decided to get some individual advice in the hands of experts...

Basically, I play Pro Evolution Soccer 6 loads and I'm trying to get it to run at the optimum frame rate so it displays better on the TV (I output my laptop via s-video to the TV for playing).

I noticed the Frapps program being mentioned so I downloaded that, to find that my FPS was 35-40 in the game. I think my computer can do 60HZ, so surely the FPS can be boosted to around 60 FPS? But I'd be happy even if the FPS was nearer 50fps.

I've seen Vsync being mentioned in various forums, but I don't know how to disable that or even if it is beneficial. The thing is I'm a bit confused with the drivers stuff, and all I can find is in "Display" which is "Plug and Play Monitor on Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Family".

Also briefly read that increasing virtual memory will affect FPS, so set that at 1000mb now.

I'm not sure what info you need, or even how to obtain it, but I guess I can give the System Properties stuff:

Computer:

Genuine Intel(R) CPU
T2050 @ 1.60 GHz
1.60 GHz, 504 MB of RAM
Physical Address Extension


Any help is VERY greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Wiseman01

 

[_FAKE_]

Your monitor doing 60Hz is just the refresh rate. When playing games with v-sync enables your framerate will not go higher than your refresh rate which is 60Hz (hence won't go higher than 60fps). If you disable v-sync (won't necessarily increase performance if you have low framerates already) than your framerate can go higher than the refresh rate (virtually unlimited) for even smoother gameplay BUT you get what is called horizontal tearing which can kinda suck in a lot of games.

To reduce tearing you can enable triple buffering. All it does is render both second the third frames while the first is being displayed. but some issues can come from this such us the third frame might be displayed over the second. Although this is rare (at least for me)

In your case your running an old Intel with a rather crappy graphics card. You can try overclocking your CPU but I don't think it will help much. You PC (no offence) is rather crap when it comes to performance. The only real viable chance of geting higher framerates is to buy a new PC, or at least get a more powerful graphics card. But your CPU being at 1.6GHz will be a bottle neck for it.

Your pretty much screwed. Buy a new PC, make sure its custom built as custom builds are the best (You know what your getting).

EDIT: Sorry if spelling is off. I got up REAL early to get the papers from the garage and am really tired.

 

[wiseman01]

Thanks for replying.

I still don't know how to disable Vsync as you described.

By the way, I'm not using an old PC, it's an Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop, bought 18 months ago. Yes, we do have a main PC in the house, but this is my personal laptop which has all my stuff on including Pro Evo.

But I understand if there's not a lot that I can do.

 

[_FAKE_]

I don't have any experience with Intel graphics processors sorry so I wouldn't know how to disable v-sync on them. On nVidia and ATI, you can disable them in there control centres.

And yea, I kinda wondered if you where using a laptop. Theres not much you can do sorry. You might be able to increase performance a little by disabling a few windows features, but thats not recommended.

Is there no option in the game do enable/disable v-sync?

EDIT: Also as for virtual memory, that is only needed if your RAM is all used up and you need more RAM to run the game. Your HDD can act as RAM as well which is called virtual memory and I think it should be set something like 125% of your system total. Since you have 512MB (although its showing 504MB) your virtual memory should be 768MB or something like that.

Virtual memory is VERY slow, and will hardly effect performance unless the games you play require a HUGE amount of RAM resource.

There is a program for XP which allows you to use certain flash drives as RAM which is recommended over HDD virtual memory. Can't remember what the program is called (its not free), but it acts similar to Vista's ReadyBoost. Perhaps you might want to look into that?

 

[Acclamator]

Vsync stops your FPS from going over your Refresh Rate. So if your Refresh Rate is 75 and your PC usually would get over 70 you'd only get 70 FPS.