I consider myself a pretty advanced and long-time 3D gamer, and always trying to keep on top of the latest video cards and games. I have a 2.1ghz P4, an Audigy 1 card, 1 gig of RAM, Windows XP on my Dell Dimension 4400. I also have a pretty snazzy GeForce4 4600ti 128MB video card. I have all the latest drivers and service packs, and the latest Detonator drivers for the GF4. I have a relatively new, fresh install of Windows XP on a 160GB 7200rpm drive. DirectX 9.0b, system often defragmented, all the usual optimizations taken care of.
I play alot of BF1942 and Dark Age of Camelot. I've noticed slowdowns while playing those two games, and using the FRAPS program shows most areas in DAOC getting about 20-25fps. In DAOC, changing my resolution from 800x600 to 1600x1200 makes no difference in frame rate, but turning on the Reflective Water makes my system crawl to about 10fps. The first few steps in new areas grinds the frame rate down to 2 or 5 fps. If I enter the game logged into a dungeon I get a silky smooth 45fps or so... but that's rare. There are many player-produced mpeg movies of ingame footage for DAOC and I'll be damned if THOSE guys aren't getting high FPS.
BF1942 has always been pretty steady at 30ish fps - but it does vary. Now I understand both of those games are online games and lag/latency have some effect on FPS. These FPS problems are not lag related. However I am beginning to think more and more about hardware problems, like I have something grossly misconfigured in my GF4 or BIOS which is slamming my frame rates. I don't think I'm running a dinosaur of a machine at all, unless many of these new games are built to be run on the very latest computers. My one year old machine with a high end video card shouldn't be struggling as much as it is. Even more frustrating is some games give me an "autodetect" graphics setting, which invariably set my default resolution and video effects to a pretty high level. But when I start those games I'm stuck with some 10fps nightmare and have to reduce them.
Today I picked up Star Wars KOTR.. which doesn't really look amazing in the graphics department, but on my system, runs anywhere from 2fps to 25fps. Morrowind is a far more graphically monsterous game, and at least that game I expect to run 15fps or so, because there's always so much going on. I'm baffled as to why I'm getting such terrible frame rates on a system which isn't exactly ancient... especially considering that my GF4 card though not the super duper latest, isn't exactly a low end card.
Resolution never seems to be a factor. 800x600 is as choppy as 1600x1200. I don't ever have any AA or filtering enabled - heaven forbid if I did, then I'd have half the frame rate I'm already eeking through. To be honest I can't imagine anyone ever using those features on their cards (due to the frame rate hit), even the day it was released when a 2.4ghz machine was the top end and the 4600ti cost $550.
I've played with overclocking my GF4, various benchmark programs, turing off unnecessary programs in the background (which I have very few of anyway). Nothing seems to make a difference. I unfortunately don't have another system faster than 2.1ghz to test out the video card on.
Does anyone have any other ideas on what I can try? I just don't think that my video card should be struggling this much to provide consisent frame rates (especially without AA or other fun stuff enabled), on a variety of different games. Does anyone else have a simliar setup to mine and somehow manage great frame rates?
