The Geforce Fx5900-Using maximum Features

[scarecrow1]

I have a Leadtek Geforce FX 5900 128Mb 8xAGP
P4 2.4GHz CPU
P4 Gigabyte Motherboard
1 Ghz DDR Ram
120Gb Harddisk

21 inch Dell Trinitron Monitor
Resolution 1152 x 864 at 100Hz

Now i have AA and AF set at the highest being 8x each, on the performance tab for the Graphics card setings.

When i play Splinter Cell/Enter the Matrix or any other High end graphics game, or Demo from upcoming high end graphics game(Tron 2.0, Chaser), they run pretty well(dont get me wrong, the graphics is awesome), but i can hear a noise coming from the graphics card as if the fans is slowing down or something, i can hear clearly and i notice a small slowdown, only slightly.

What would i need to run my Graphics card with the highest settings- 8x without having that noise and slight slow downs? Or in other words, i would like to keep the settings as they are, but find a way of getting rid of those problems. Should i get a faster CPU? does anyone know what can be done?

[JayMan]

The noise is probably the fans on the graphics card actually speeding up for usage while in 3d mode.

And i think the slow downs are always gonna happen trying to run that high of AA & AF settings on new games... The 5900 ultra might cope better... But i think even that would be struggling slightly with 8XS AA & 8xAF in those games.

I think splinter cell actually automatically turns off AA or AF when it detects the nvidia drivers... So ya may not actually be even using those features fully & it still runs slow...

JayMan

[scarecrow1]

If there is always going to be slow down in 8x, why do graphic cards have that feature? Is there no way of using those high features without slowdown or problems?

What type of settings do you reccomend i use on my computer to get the best out of games(for example the upcoming Halfife2, Halo, Tron 2.0, Chaser, Max Payne 2, Doom3)

[JayMan]

Well the thing is ya can use those features. Just that it wont always be playable on some of the newer games...

Give Quake3 or something like that a go at those settings and ya should be fine with it (except ya can't use 8XS AA in openGL, so it'll default to 4x AA).

Basically those features are there incase you wanna use them for say a RPG type game where having hi FPS isn't always that important...

Plus sometimes its not always the graphic cards fualt for a game running slow... Take morrowind for example, even on huge rigs its hard to get really high FPS. Same with starwars galexies, many top of the line pc's still can get that running fast with all the features enabled.

JayMan

[scarecrow1]

JayMan would upgrading my Cpu to 3Ghz and Memory to 1.5 Ghz do the job? would that help increasing the speed in order to use the highest settings?

[JayMan]

To be honest i don't know. But i don't see the point in upgrading to that when you already have a damn good system. If you;ve already got 1GB of ram thats definatly enough for now... 1.5Gb of ram would be abit of a waste unless you do video/audio/graphics work.

Just try bumping the AA back to 4x, can probably leave the AF at 8x. Have a play around with that.

But yeh, test different settings, ya may find you can't even tell the difference (or enough of a difference to justify the performance hit) slightly lower setting.

JayMan

[scarecrow1]

JayMan thanks for the help i really appreciate that,

what system do you have if you dont mind me asking? and what kind of graphics card do you have? what games do you play?

[JayMan]

I've got a fairly old system by todays standard...

1Ghz P3
768MB PC133
128MB GF4ti4200
80MB combined HDD space (20GB + 60GB)
etc...

Havent had time to play many games lately... But yeh as far as PC games go i'm into morrowind (tho i havent played it for a while... will have to get back into that i think...), SOF2 (just started playing that recently), GTA3, Ghost Recon, Enter the Matrix (tho i don't play that since completing it) etc... Also play a few racing games here n there...

JayMan