Just bought new graphics card

[Cpl Steiner]

Whilst the forum was down my graphics card developed a fault of some kind, so I ordered a new one. I wanted to ask which would be best but of course the forum was down so I didn't get a chance. Now I've ordered it and the forum is up, perhaps someone could tell me if the card I've ordered will play CM:SF without any problems.

The new card is a "Zotac 8800GT 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E". I know that in the past some owners of 8xxx series cards have had low FPS issues but I'm hoping this has now been resolved. Is there anyone who owns this card who is still having problems playing CM:SF? I am using a Windows XP machine with a dual core AMD64 3800+ processor, in case that makes any difference.

[Madmatt]

I have a 8800GT card and have no issues at all with CMSF under XP. I am running the latest Forceware drivers directly from Nvidia. I think most of the reported issues in the past were related to Vista by and large.

Here are some driver settings you may want to adjust for best results in CMSF (and many other games).

Select "Extension Limit" to OFF in your Nvidia control panel.

In addition to the Extension Limit setting, some people have reported performance increases can also occur by setting the "Threaded optimization" to OFF and Triple Buffering to ON for Nvidia cards. Your results may vary.

Madmatt

[SlapHappy]

I have a Palit 8800 GT with 1 GB memory. I noticed a substantial increase from my 8600 GTS card (which sucked). I also have a QUAD processor (2.4 GHZ per core). I don't believe CMSF benefits greatly if at all from multi-core systems, so any likely difference I would see would simply be the difference between your 2.0 GHZ and my 2.4 GHZ.

The best recommendation I could give you would be to use FRAPS to give you some baseline test information and slowly up-clock your processor to see if the baseline FPS numbers improve. I believe CMSF is one of those games that are as CPU dependent as they are GPU dependent (and possibly more so, especially at 1024 x 768 or 1280 X 1024 resolutions). BTW is that the X2 3800+ (dual core) or the single core version?

[Cpl Steiner]

I have a 8800GT card and have no issues at all with CMSF under XP. I am running the latest Forceware drivers directly from Nvidia. I think most of the reported issues in the past were related to Vista by and large.

Here are some driver settings you may want to adjust for best results in CMSF (and many other games).

Select "Extension Limit" to OFF in your Nvidia control panel.

In addition to the Extension Limit setting, some people have reported performance increases can also occur by setting the "Threaded optimization" to OFF and Triple Buffering to ON for Nvidia cards. Your results may vary.

Madmatt

Thanks for the reassurance and for the settings tips. I won't get the card for a few days yet (free delivery option is "within 5 working days") but I'll try them out as soon as I install the card.

Congrats on the new site!

I have a Palit 8800 GT with 1 GB memory. I noticed a substantial increase from my 8600 GTS card (which sucked). I also have a QUAD processor (2.4 GHZ per core). I don't believe CMSF benefits greatly if at all from multi-core systems, so any likely difference I would see would simply be the difference between your 2.0 GHZ and my 2.4 GHZ.

The best recommendation I could give you would be to use FRAPS to give you some baseline test information and slowly up-clock your processor to see if the baseline FPS numbers improve. I believe CMSF is one of those games that are as CPU dependent as they are GPU dependent (and possibly more so, especially at 1024 x 768 or 1280 X 1024 resolutions). BTW is that the X2 3800+ (dual core) or the single core version?

It's an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ 2.01 GHz with 2.00 GB of RAM. Thanks also for your advice.

[SlapHappy]

If you want a good basis of some potential differences you might see, load a tough to render scenario with your old card before you install the new one. Then monitor the start-up state fps from the default camera view before you even press start. After noting the FPS, try the same thing with the new card installed. This gives you at least an "apples to apples" comparison between the two cards. Of course, the FPS will change dramatically when actually playing the game, but that is the whole point of using the start-up screen for the tests.

Come to think of it, a replay file might be another good tester, since the replay would be exactly the same for both of the tests. I don't know what card you're coming from, but in my case the upgrade made a difference that was very noticeable. Under heavy firefights, the "City Ruins" scenario is still fairly unplayable. With certain camera angles, I can still only achieve about 8-9 FPS! Just too many buildings or sumfink......

[Roter Stern]

Running an nVidia 8800 GTS 512 by ASUS on Vista x64, at 1440x900 (16:10 widescreen), without any problems in CMSF.

[Cpl Steiner]

I thought I'd just post to say that I got my new 8800 GT graphics card a few days back and it is working fine with CM:SF. However, I did have to set the "Threaded Optimisation" setting to "Off" as recommended by MadMatt, as initially my FPS were quite low when I first installed it and tried out CM:SF. So, if anyone else is thinking of getting this card (which is really excellent in my opinion, and a lot cheaper now), don't worry about low FPS with CM:SF.