andhen2003 Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 I recently upgraded my card to ATI radeon 128M PCI card. First off, CMAK and CMBB (to a lesser extent) are both running much slower and choppier. And, I get some strange lines at the bottom of my screen on CMAK. Anyone else have these kinds of problems? I have updated all of the drivers, and I have more than 700megs of RAM, so that shouldn't be the bottleneck. I've heard anecdotally that Nvidea cards are better. Any help or advice? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 What driver version do you have? What card exactly? NVidia cards are better because they have much better drivers but the hardware isn't that much faster. Depends on the game. There are some awfully slow marketing trick cards for both NVidia and ATI. Tell us what you have. For CM as one particular game you probably want a card with very high memory bandwidth, CM doesn't do anything fancy 3D-wise. If you got one of those cards which carry the bytes over in a bucket chain you lose big. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 This may be an issue with ATI's "ZMask". It seems to have cause problems for other users. To turn it off you'll need to download and install a 3rd party tweaking program. Rage3D Tweak 3.9 is usually available from the Rage3D website, but that is down at the moment. Once this tweaker is installed you will have to go through the DirectX options (I believe) and disable the ZMask (your disabling ATI's optimizations for ZMask processing - which seems to be the problem). You may need to reboot at that point (I can't remember) and the high speed ZMask should be disabled and your framerate should be a bit better (though possibly not to the extent you're expecting). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andhen2003 Posted December 2, 2004 Author Share Posted December 2, 2004 guys -- i'm not at home but will get you the info. i am fearful after hearing redwolf refer to "marketing trick cards" that i might not have purchased as powerful a card as i thought i did. while it's 128megs, it also was only about $100 bucks US. i don't know crap about hardware. maybe even though the memory is high the pipline to the pc is slow? can you guys please suggest a better card to me? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 BTW, what card did you have before and why did you upgrade? Why did you say you have a PCI card? Don't you have an AGP slot? If I had to choose a CM card for less than $100 I would ebay a GeForce Ti 4x00. Forced to buy under $100 new I would get a GeForce FX 5700LE for $73. There is an unfortunate gap in current NVidia AGP offerings. For PCI express you can get a 6600 for $120, but for AGP you can only get a FX 5700 (no letters) for $120. But that one sucks compared to the 6600. The FX 5900XT is the first NVidia AGP card with a bit of horsepower, for $180, and runs most modern games well. Except for some of the newest offerings like Half-Life 2. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andhen2003 Posted December 2, 2004 Author Share Posted December 2, 2004 the card the PC came with didn't support 3D which is why i chose to upgrade. don't remember off top of my head. i don't mind spending more than $100. And yes, I have an AGP slot, but when i bought the card i thought i only had PCI slots (again i don't know hardware well). Is there a big sacrifice in speed using the PCI slot instead of the AGP slot? i figured it was negligible, which is why i didn't run right back to the store and get an AGP card. BTW thanks for the help; can't get over what a helpful group of people play this game!!! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 Yes, PCI is slower. But why did the game feel slower when you upgraded your graphics? Obviously, it was 3D-capable onboard graphics if it ran CMBB or CMAK at all. My guess is your onboard graphics is Intel Extreme Graphics or something similar. That chipset is actually fast in some regards and very slow in others. It can do basic 3D pretty fast - which is all that CM uses. If that assumption is correct and if you then upgrade with a GeForce FX 5200 PCI or similar then other games will get faster, but CM will get slower. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted December 4, 2004 Share Posted December 4, 2004 andhen2003, I would still be curious what your old onboard video was and what your PCI card is. Obviously we would like to prevent other people from making the same "accidential CM downgrade". 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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