need help with radeon 9800 pro

kinada423 · 2003-08-12, 09:43 AM

I have a radeon 9800 pro and I am having difficulty getting acceptable framerates in the game. I know its not an issue of pc or drivers. I tried the newest omega drivers but it was having difficulty running some othe games with their newest set and the older version of their drivers suprising weren't giving out the rates of the ati drivers. I have the newest via hyperion driver installs, I have most recent ati drivers, most recent sound card drivers and my bios is up to the current release. I wanted some advice on how I could get the performance and visual quality to expect from the card I spent 400 dollars on. I get 40-50fps max inside with no battles etc. Large outdoor battles drop it down below 10fps and this is with all the setting on low at 1024x768 @16 bit color. All the control settings for the ati drivers are set to performance as well. My system specs are as follows:

athlon xp 2200+
kt400 chipset motherboard (soyo black dragon edition)
running at 8x agp with 128mb arpeture in bios
640 mb of micron pc2100 ram
hercules gametheater xp
the game is installed on a 40gb 7200rpm drive which is freshly defragged and runs a program in background to autoplace files to keep the freshly defragged feel (I have turned this off to check performance and results remained the same.)
radeon 9800pro 128mb version
Enermax 460w power supply (power obviously not an issue)
3.3mbps/256kbps Cable connection running through Router
My cpu temp runs steady idle around 34degrees celsius and around 38degrees at full load so proper cooling is not an issue.

Performance in other games is not an issue. Q3a runs maxxed out with fsaa cranked to 4x or higher with no issues as well as splinter cell, unreal2, army ops, half life medal of honor, motogp2, operation flashpoint, return to castle wolfenstien, and pre-gold (trial edition) of jedi knight 3:jedi academy. As you can see my system specs are well up to par and having that kind of framerate in planetside just seems unacceptable. I have tried cranking the settings up in planetside thinking it could be underused causing lower performance which was an nvidia problem back when gforce2 first came out. Even worse results. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as u can notice my frustration. Thank you and I can't wait to find a solution to this problem.

kinada423 · 2003-08-15, 04:24 PM

Anyone have any suggestions? Come on I know your out there!

Doobz · 2003-08-15, 06:06 PM

dude, it's a memory management issue with planetside

i got a 9800 Pro as well, and it seem that right when the map loads, i get very low FPS, and this continues for a few minutes

after that though everything runs fine, 2x AA, 16x AF 1280x960

Doobz · 2003-08-15, 06:07 PM

what i've heard helps with this, though i have yet to try, is a huge swapfile, like 2 gigs big

kinada423 · 2003-08-16, 01:56 PM

Since the initial post I went out and bought another 512mb stick of pc2100 ram putting me at a gig. Hence then I have checked to be sure I have newest version of direct x. I have a static sized swapfile on a hard drive other than windows. It runs slightly better around 35fps outside and inside it gets better but in large fights its still continues to drop sometimes as low as 2.9fps. This is makes no different whether it is at low or high the output is the same. I mean I suppose it could be attributed to the server or something because i could be staring at a wall in a base with a large battle outside and it woudl still drop. Evenmoreso than the usual loss.

Doobz · 2003-08-16, 05:51 PM

ok, well, the ONLY thing i can attribute this too right now is either you've got some programs running in the background OR your processor is inadequate

kinada423 · 2003-08-16, 08:21 PM

Nope. My system only uses 3%cpu while idling. Only programs I have running are motherboard monitor 5, avg virus panel, my logitech mouseware prog, and the sound card utility. So its not an issue with things running in background. That is the reason this puzzles me. I have even tried turning all of that off and same results. The cpu is xp 2200+ which runs at 1.8ghz so I don't think that is the issue. Any other suggestions?

NoSurrender · 2003-08-16, 08:25 PM

ok a few things PC2100 is SLOW ram thats one thing and PS can even bring the greatest comp to its knees

TF_MrA · 2003-08-20, 08:21 PM

i would suggest either getting ddr2700 if your mobo supports it, or get a crap load more ram, like up to 1.5gb.

PallarAndersVis · 2003-08-24, 09:32 PM

planetside is just a horrible game engine. nothing is wrong with your pc 2100.

PallarAndersVis · 2003-08-31, 12:31 PM

yes. people will tell you all day that your pc2100 is too slow, blah blah blah. the fact of the matter is, planetside's engine is garbage. dont go spending a shitload of money on your system just because planetside sux0rs. I spent the money on a radeon 9800 and to no avail, my framerates in the big battles are only a little better. all my other games look great though

dont spend anymore money on your system for Planetside. Just bear with the low fps :/

TF_MrA · 2003-08-31, 09:15 PM

well, there is something that u can do to make your game run muuuuch faster. see, when planetside is installed, it assumes that you dont have a soundcard, so it uses planetside to create the sounds. but, you can change it so that your soundcard runs the sounds, which make PS soooooo much faster.

User58 · 2003-09-11, 10:19 PM

Originally posted by TF_MrA
well, there is something that u can do to make your game run muuuuch faster. see, when planetside is installed, it assumes that you dont have a soundcard, so it uses planetside to create the sounds. but, you can change it so that your soundcard runs the sounds, which make PS soooooo much faster.

I run an Audigy2 card and the sound SUCKS. It breaks up all the time.

EDIT: How do I switch that over?