7800GTX, Quake 4, and my front lawn

A

AuxNuke

Gawd
Joined
Nov 11, 2001
Messages
605
[rant]
I am this --> | | close to taking my "new" video card and launching it, frisbee style, onto my snowy front lawn and prompty ordering my black lab to leave a tightly coiled pile directly on top of this wretched waste of silicon.
[/rant]

Now that we have my feelings out of the way, I am seriously starting to think that something is wrong with my card (or me, the anal idot). I load up Quake 4, match the "Higest Playable Settings" as recommended by [H] reviews: In this case, 1600x1200 with 2x AA / High Quality (4x AF). I start a brand new game hoping to play through it this time at a higer difficulty setting. I skip the opening move and get tossed right to the landing site, only to be greeted with the world worst choppiness. As If I loaded up Q4 on an aged 9700 Pro. First instinct was "Shit I did something wrong." So I doubled checked my settings and launched Q4 again. Same garbage. After reducing settings, I finally settled on a "Playable" setting of 1280x1024, 2x AA / High Quality.

Mebe I'm just a picky bastard and what the [H] thinks is "playable" is absolute garbage to me. So I fire up multiplayer and the 3rd map we play is larger and more open than the other 2 smaller maps we just battled through. CHOP CITY. My system is down in my signature below. To rule out the possibility that my overclocks were causing the problems, I ran Q4 again at default speeds and found, u guessed it, MORE CHOP. It seems this way in many of the games I play.... that I can't match the settings that all of the review sites get with similar or identical hardware.

This is a 2 week old fresh installation of Windows XP with the 81.95 nvidia drivers. My Sandra scores are right on the money and 3DMark05 pulls a score right under 8500. Anyone have any idea whats wrong or am I just terribly picky when it comes to frame rates?

Thank you in advance,
~Aux
 
I also get crap performance on Quake 4 and I too have settled on those same exact settings you play at. And even then, I see ugly dips into the 35ish area in some spots that look very noticable to me.
 
Very interesting...


I play quake 4 on a A64 3700 with a single and dual 7800GT's and i can play at 1280x1024 with 16xAA and AF on the SLI setup

On a single card i do about the same expect aa is down to 8 and AF is at 16.. both are at high quality...

Now as for your problem...did you install chipset drivers? maybe messed somthing up in the control panel.. like possibly forced AA and AF on...Did you try to run the drivers by application? And have the game deal with AA and AF?

To me it sounds like you forced somthing on.
 
Could be that Q4 is incompatible with the new drivers. Is there a patch out for it yet?
 
Bona Fide said:
Could be that Q4 is incompatible with the new drivers. Is there a patch out for it yet?
Click to expand...

I run those drivers and i don't have a problem with them
 
The only thing I force in the driver panel is Triple Buffering becuase without Vsync I get terrible tearing.
 
Do you have multimonitor profomance on? or single?

If you have multi on...it will cause major slow down. or it does for me if i do that.
 
hmm something is definetly wrong, I'm running high quality 1280x1024, 2x AA, 16af and It's perfectly smooth.
 
Disable triple bufferiing and enable vsync just to see what happens.
 
Tripple buffer and V-sync have never been on. To go stright down the list of my driver settings under "Performance & Quality":

Application profiles: Global driver settings

Antialiasing = Application-controlled
Anisotropic = Application-controlled
Image settings = Quality
Color profile = Not availible
Vsync = Application-controlled
Force mipmaps = None
Conformant texture clamp = On
Extension limit = Off
Hardware acceleration = Single-display mode
Trilinear optimization = On
Ansiotropic mip filter optimization = Off
Ansiotropic sample optimization = On
Gamma correct antialiasing = On
Transperancy antialiasing = Off
Triple buffering = Off
Negative LOD bias = Allow

I see some of you are having the same problems. I can run 1280x1024, 2x AA, High Quality just fine in single player. But some maps in multiplayer chop up a storm. I'm stumped. Especially since when I play COD2, it seems like the frame rates I am getting are, in fact, on par with reviews. Any other ideas?

~Aux
 
Quake 4 runs perfect for me at 1280x1024 4xaa 8xaf (My monitor won't let me go higher)
 
There is a problem with the latest Q4 patch and the latest NVIDIA drivers, although I think it's only limited to "dual core"
 
Hmmm. I set Transparency antialiasing to "Mulisampling" and loaded up Quake 4 again. This time, it seemed much more playable. There are still some spots of slowdown, but I know that I'm picky when it comes to minimum framerate. What I'll do, is run through the whole level with fraps on and report my results here. Anyone else with a similar experience?

~Aux
 
hero123 said:
it might be your dual core? did u fixed that up yet?
Click to expand...

I'm curious about what you mean. Do you mean a smp command in the game or somethign like affinity? LMK!

~Aux
 
Runs pefectly smooth high frame rates for me with a 7800gt and 3.8 amd 64 with 2 gigs ram. Make sure you install your motherboard drivers, and also the amd duel core driver fix along with the microsoft duel core fix and you shouldnt have anymore problems.
 
Well, I noticed a nice improvement by restoring both thw Global Driver settings and the Quake 4 profile in the driver control panel. I also disabled vsync and triple buffering. I'm so glad now I can play with 4xAA on (sorta)!


But now onto another game that seems to run like crap: Call of Duty 2! Is it just me or is that game just bad? No matter what settings I put I seem to get the same amount of FPS in that game (20-50) averaging at about 25-35 most of the time. The only ONE setting that makes a difference is chaning the Direct X mode. Is this game just stupid or what, becuase I have noticed most of, if not all of, the video card reviewing sites never seem to show results for this game.
 
hmm everyone has said everyhting that i was going to say...but try playing FEAR and tell us what you get and HL2..
 
Ok. I've applied Fix # 1 and 2, the AMD driver and the Microsoft hotfix. After enabling the hotfix in the registry, I loaded single player again at: 1600x1200, 2x TRMS AA / High Quality. It definitely played.... better. Was it "playable" like the [H] said? Yes. Was it playable by my standards? No. But the good news is, I played Multiplayer on the same map that I was having trouble with before at 1280x1024, 2x TRMS AA, High Quality and it ran flawless even with 10 people on the map. So that is definitely improvement from before.

I think I should still do what I had originally planned and run through a single player level with Fraps on at the "playable" settings and see what numbers I come up with. Thanks for all the help and I'll keep ya posted.

~Aux
 
Am I the only one that runs 16x12 with only 4x af online? AA causes lag and spikes the ping, as do shadows. With triple buffer enabled and vsync enabled it's butter smooth of course. :)
I want seamless gameplay, no lag, and no frame dips even with multiple effects blaring.

I can run aa/af fine on at high res, but I choose not to online.
 
AA in CoD2 will slaughter your FPS. At 1280x1024 everything maxed out with 4xAA I can only average about 20FPS. With AA off, I can average literally triple that at 60FPS.
 
(Still haven't run Fraps on Q4 yet... been playing with these new hotfixes)

See mine seems to run ok. COD2 at 1280x1024, 2x TRMS AA, AF On Max settings run great in single and multiplayer. I guess my main gripe is with Q4. Doom 3 runs good...must be something wrong with me :)

~Aux
 
Flexion said:
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?...s&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=216&page=1

It's a damned conspiracy. The latest patch for Quake 4 actually makes AMD dual core performance worse.
Click to expand...

I agree 100%. I thought for sure this would be great, dual core in Quake4, but I right away after I went through the readme file I thought it might only help Intel chips.

"This update enables Quake 4 to take advantage of the Hyper-Threading
technology of Intel(r) Dual core processors."

What a rip. At least now I know someone else isn't running it at 16*12 on a 7800gt :)
 
try running the adjust for best settings in quake 4 video options and then set the custom settings resolution/aa etc
 
I still have 1.0.4 (thankfully) and am using the newest nvidia drivers, 81.95 that is supposed to give performance boots for dual cores / HT anyway. Hmmm.
 
wow, all this makes me glad my current machine can't play those games anyways. :rolleyes:
 
whoa...glad I didn't install the Q4 patch now.. yeah, I saw all that catering to Hyper-Threading on the patch and thought - no thanks... sounds like quite a bit of tuning has happend since the OP went up.. you should really have no prob with 2xAA on high... what I would make sure you do is leave the driver settings alone, no AA or AF, then let the in game settings do all the IQ adjusting... leave it on "high" qual and set vysnc on and then AA = 2x. That should be playable... if not turn AA off I guess... anyways - good luck!
 
This probably has nothing to do with your problem, but just another thing I noticed running my machine. Specs are in my sig. When I want to run Quake4, I have to disable my virus-scan on-access scan. Im running McAfee virusscan 8.0i (not the security center version) and it always seems to crash the game on load up. Might just be my machine, or a bug in virusscan, but it might also affect other people as well.
 
Ok I've benched my system in Quake 4 the same way the [H] does it. I used Fraps to record my fps for 3 mins on the 2nd level of the Quake 4 single player campaign, "Air Defense Trenches". Here are my results:

1280x1024, 2x TR MSAA, High Quality (4x AF)
Frames = 9192
Time(ms) = 180000
Min = 35
Max = 62
Avg = 51.067

1600x1200, 2x TR MSAA, High Quality (4x AF)
Frames = 7856
Time(ms) = 180000
Min = 25
Max = 62
Avg = 43.644

That's a lot different that the results here at the [H]. Take for example their preview of the 512mb 7800GTX card Here. The results of the BFG 7800GTX 256mb (my card) show a slightly lower Minimum frame rate but a much higher average framerate than my results. This could be due to the fact that they are playing for longer, and over time, the frame rate averages out to be higher (which is very plausible on the "Hub 1" level). But for me, the dips down to 22fps (or anything under 40 fps for that matter) when you reach an outdoor scene or large fire fight does NOT constitute a playable setting. Thats like saying, "Well as long are you are running inside a building and only fighting 1 - 2 enemies at the same time, this game is playable." I know this is all a subjective matter, and I'm perfectly fine "settling" for 1280 @ 2x TR MSAA but it gets to me sometimes ;)

~Aux
 
I agree....someone's idea of "playable" is really "slow as ass" half the time and choppy....


To get a steady 60fps online in big fights, I have to stay at 1280 res and turn some IQ off......even then it don't feel right.

I personally think Q4A runs like ass....not to mention online play sucks, talk about sparse....
 
Omg... this is why I hate computers. I just downloaded the new 81.98 drivers and ran the benchmarks again. You wont believe it.

1280x1024, 2x TR MSAA, High Quality (4x AF)
Frames = 10582
Time(ms) = 180000
Min = 45
Max = 62
Avg = 58.789

1600x1200, 2x TR MSAA, High Quality (4x AF)
Frames = 9844
Time(ms) = 180000
Min = 39
Max = 62
Avg = 54.689

I am speechless. I have the .xls files generated by fraps to prove all 4 of these benchmarks. This leads me to one of 3 conclusions:
1) There was something wrong with my driver installation previously
2) These new 81.98 drivers own
3) The dual core optimizations in these drivers are fantastic

I'm leaning towards Option 1! :p Can someone else without a dual core system give this benchmark a try with the new 81.98's? Thanks!

~Aux
 
This question may sound stupid, but does your power supply have enough power? I had a PSU with only one rail running my 7800gt. My laptop's ati 9600 ran Everquest 2 better than my desktop. I purchased a new PSU with sufficient power and its like a brand new video card!
 
Phew, glad you got it fixed bro! my 7800GTX-OC should be here on Friday and I was looking forward to playing it on my FP2001, which looks like shit on a shingle at anything but 1600x1200. Happy fragging!
 
godsfshrmn said:
This question may sound stupid, but does your power supply have enough power? I had a PSU with only one rail running my 7800gt. My laptop's ati 9600 ran Everquest 2 better than my desktop. I purchased a new PSU with sufficient power and its like a brand new video card!
Click to expand...

I've got a Silverstone ST60F 600watt SLI certified PSU. I sure as hell hope thats not my problem :)

~Aux
 
91.98's helped me too....no numbers, but it sure as hell feels a bit better...I was playing online at 1680x1050, all special effects on, 8x AF but no AA....I really don't care about AA as much, running at a high res....it seemed good....now to see if I can turn on SMP inside Q4 without locking up the game, as it did with the previous driver version....
 
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