Graphics cards comparisons

[Midland]

I was using a Radeon 9600 pro with moderate results (a fair bit of stutter from time to time) but recently replaced it with my son's 6600 GT. The first thing I had to do was to upgrade my power from 350 watts to 400 watts as it kept cutting out on me. It doesn't cut out any more but the results do not look particularly better than with the Radeon. In one session which I have run five times I have yet to finish it because somewhere along the way the programme just seizes up and I have to Ctrl-alt-del to recover my PC! Although this problem seems to have occurred since the change-over it is possible that something else is causing it. It's possible that the CPU is now so maxed out that it is choking when there is a swag of Trainz type data being processed. My son certainly thinks the 6600 GT is way better than the Radeon 9600 pro and also has a very low opinion of the Trainz software and graphics. He wants me to try a game that shows off the 6600 GT to good effect but I'm not wildly into PC games like he is.

I am running this under an AMD Athlon 3000+ with 2 Gb RAM.

Any suggestions whatsoever would be gratefully received as I am not particularly PC literate and have a very limited understanding of what to do about this. If I can't get good results with the 6600 GT I'd just as soon go back to the Radeon stutter...


Cheers

Nix


PS On reflection I've just realised that this session involves the UP Gas Turbine which I know is very poly heavy. Could it be that this is the source of my problems? I should try the 6600 GT with some less demanding sessions and see how it shapes up.

N

 

[john259]

FWIW I replaced a Radeon 9800 with an XFX 7600GT and that had an enormous positive effect on performance with Trainz and also Mount & Blade.

Is your ventilation adequate? If might be worth checking the temperatures using one of the many freeware utilities available on the 'net. You can use nVidia nTune to report the graphics board temperature.

HTH, John

 

[ilovetrainz_UP]

Well...I replaced an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 with a GeForce 7300 GT (cause of the 3.0 shaders) and its so much better. The thing that was happening though, was I had too many apps running during a program, about 40% on Idle...so you might want to check that BEFORE you play trainz...

 

[john259]

Good idea. Start > Run > msconfig > Startup and then look up each item on http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php to see if it's necessary, optional or undesirable.

John

 

[johnwhelan]

When you switched video cards did you reinstall the operating system and get the latest drivers?

Basically one problem can be old bits of driver left hanging around especially when you replace an ATI card with an nVidea one or vice versa. There are programs that can clean out the old drivers as an alturnative if you dig in the forum.

Cheerio John

 

[AussieNightcrawler]

Hi Nix,

I agree with John above, make sure that you have fully cleaned the system of all ATI drivers, there still can be 'leftovers' hanging around on the system that could cause problems.

I have never been able to change from ATI to nVidia (or vise-versa) without a format and full clean reinstall of windows, too many problems.

I also have a 6600GT, 256MB version teamed up with a P4 2.8GHz and 1GB Ram, I have no major issues, a little slow down in highly populated areas but no lockups or crashes.

 

[Midland]

I have just run Far Cry with the Hardware OC Benchmark settings on Ultra (which are higher than the game's highest available settings) at 1280 x 1024 with 2 x AA for two hours straight with no problems at all and also good performance. It seems unlikely that the graphics card or its driver is causing these problems in Trainz. My son has suggested upgrading to a 3500+ CPU which on his own set up did improve performance. Incidentally the performance of his ex-graphics card in my PC was miles better than it ever was in his set up! He really doesn't have a very high opinion of the Trainz software...

Oh yes, I ran that problem session earlier this afternoon and after an hour or so it crashed Trainz. I still haven't managed to get to the end of this session. Maybe I should just consign Trainz to the waste paper basket and start playing all these kiddy games my son likes playing... :hehe:



Cheers

Nix

 

[Midland]

Okay, as an experiment I shut down all the portals in this session and just ran the UP Gas Turbine with its train. Same problem; get about 30 - 40 minutes into the session and it all turns to custard. For what it's worth here are the error messages I get...







Definitely not a graphics card issue methinks...




Cheers

Nix

 

[johnwhelan]

Okay, as an experiment I shut down all the portals in this session and just ran the UP Gas Turbine with its train. Same problem; get about 30 - 40 minutes into the session and it all turns to custard. For what it's worth here are the error messages I get...







Definitely not a graphics card issue methinks...




Cheers

Nix

Trainz pushes things to the limits and although a different game may run smoothly it may not use the same functions as Trainz does on the graphics card. If it ran fine before switching the card then I strongly suspect reinstalling the operating system will cure the problem.

Cheerio John

 

[winjmoore]

you are running trs2004 in vista
that works
remove rubbish from your system
this asumes you did not remove the ati drivers before changing cards
uninstall nvidia drivers
turn off pc
put in ati card
start pc maybe twice
uninstall all ati drivers
turn off pc put in nvidia card
when new hardware found click cancle probably twice
download drivers for your card from nvidia.com
install
restart

part 2
msconfig
click start assessires command prompt
type
start msconfig (and who says dos is dead, and for itiods that say you can click start run... that is not a defualt option in vista)
and press enter
click the startup tab
untick everything but your virus scanner and anything with the word nvidia in it
click ok
you can always turn other things back on latter

part 3
your video card it not real powerfull
I'd take it back and get at least a 78..
but $$$

part 4
to run trainz
right click on it and click
run as administrator

part 5
if none of these work go to ferrymead and enjoy your loverly city

 

[winjmoore]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=722&model2=742&chart=275

These people that buy the cheapest then .....
anyway this is a list of video cards
check out a card that gives at least 50

but your cpu is also slow

trainz is like a huge database and has huge amounts of calucations to do
the video card than has to do all its stuff to display

consider putting xp back on it to make it run better
you could also maybe upgrade the cpu for not much 250