video card compatibility?

[*bettykay]

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2003 8:01 pm

Hi folks,
Sorry I haven't visited in a long time, been too busy with work. Gotta question for the computer experts. My husband loves to play a game called Fighter Ace, which is a real time WW2 dogfigting online game. They just upgraded the game, better graphics and such, but now our old computer is having troubles. He gets frame lock up or disconnected from the server. We have been told that we need to upgrade our RAM, video card, and modem. The RAM and modem, I can handle, but I have questions about the video card. We are looking at the Radeon 9000 128MB, but I don't understand what the 4x or 8x AGP means. I also am not sure if it would be compatible with our Pentium 3 Gateway. I checked the manufacturers technical information stuff, and didn't see anything that was incompatible, but I wanted to double check with y'all. Any help would be appreciated!!
thanks,
Bettykay

[*Wgoodrich]

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2003 9:16 pm

BettyKay, before you go buying a bunch of stuff I would perform a detailed inventory of what you now have on your puter.

Have you cleared your temporary internet files?
Have you cleared your cookies?
Have you checked your archives [back up deleated files] to see if your are overloaded?

These three things not cleared on a regular basis can overload you system causing your puter to slow to a snails speed and thus causing your system to lock up when playing games.

It may be you need new STUFF. Yet if he has been playing this game with no problems I am suspecting you have a lot of junck saved on your hard drive by your explorer program over a long period of time.

Clean those files out best you can and you may be surprised how much speed you will get back ! No money spent but a bit of time.

Click on your MY DOCUMENTS, then click once on your C drive. You should see a pie on the lower right that will tell you how loaded your C drive is right now. This may help you but not always telling all. Still I would clean out your files discribed above first.

On your desktop right click your explorer icon. Then click properties. then click delete cookies and again click delete files [including all off line files when asked. This will clean up your puter a lot.

Then click on MY COMPUTER icon on your desktop and look for BACK UP OF "C". Double click that back up of C and look for deleted files. Start deleting all you can there. This too will speed your puter up a lot.

Then before you do anything else again click on MY DOCUMENTS and look at your pie to see if it shows less on the hard drive.

Restart you puter and try your game again. This may help you a lot.

Let us know what you find

Good Luck

Wg

[*bettykay]

Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 8:39 am

Thanks Warren, we run disk cleanup and defrag like 3 times a week. We have over 17GB of free space on the C drive. I am not sure how to get to the backup of C drive though. I didn't see it under My Computer, you may have to tell me more specifically. The thing is, he has started to have the problems since they upgraded the game. The minimum requirements to run this game are a Pentium 3, 256MB RAM, 32 MB accelerate graphics card that supports 3D, 450MB free space for hard drive installation, and 512MB swap file on hard drive. But they recommend 512 RAM, 64 MB 3D accelerated graphics card, and 750 mb swap file on hard drive. I know we are definitely lacking in the RAM. This old machine only had 128 RAM, but we have already bought more and just waiting for it to get here. I know the video card is lacking too. We have a nvidia Geoforce 2 with only 32MB. Wanted to splurge on the Radeon 9000 128MB, since I have read nothing but good reviews about it. I figured out that AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port, which we do have, but I can't figure out if ours is 2x or 4x. Anyway, I just wanted to know if there was anything I am overlooking about video cards that would make it incompatibile with our computer. I don't want to waste my money when we could buy a new computer with everything we need for like $800. Thanks for your help.
Bettykay
PS if y'all wanna check this game out, go to jaleco.com and look for Fighter Ace.

[*dkerr]

Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 4:43 pm

The newer breed of games takes more resources. For the everyday run of the mill applications even most pention one's work work fine. But when you get into video editing, the modern erea of action & grahic entense games, they demand a lot of resources from your computer. To me for every game that doesn't work well or at all on my computer there is another 9 that will. But for some that are really into gaming then you must have good resources to enjoy these games well.

If you add up the cost of the near top of the line 3D video cards, additional ram, perhaps that improved sound card that you may wish for in the near future, and rather or not your CPU/Bus speed and AGP compatability to the newer cards you may be approaching the $ 800 you mentioned that would have everything you require.

But this is a personal choice. System that get well used over time, tend to become clutered, and sometimes will overtime become sluggesh and not as responsive as it used to be. I tend to format my system 2 or 3 times a year and reinstall the system, this usually solves most problems, and takes about a half a day of work to perform (if you have a high speed internet connection to do updates, otrherwise it may take longer) , however your case it may be a resourse problem as some games demand a lot.

Performance is a lot of combination of factors, including....

1. cpu type and speed
2. Bus speed
3. Hard Drive speed / access speed
4. sound card
5. video / graphics card
6. type of memory and amount of memory
7. cd rom speed
8. the number of background programs running at the same time.

Sound cards and video cards that are low on onboard resources or on board memory on the card itself will try and make up for it by using the main memory /resourses from the motherboard, thereby restricting those resources available for other functions