Am I getting the most from my video card? (1 Viewer)

[MikeH1]

I have been enjoying for the last 2 months online gaming with Battlefield 1942. I never realized gaming could be so much fun. So much, in fact, that about 2 weeks ago I turfed my 64 mb Geforce 4 MX 420 and bought a 128 mb GeForce 4 Ti 4600. A $80.00 CDN card to a $475.00 card. My Frames per second went through the roof from an average of 15-30 to an average of 50-70 and quite often higher. Much of the choppiness was eliminated. Woohooo!!

My question arises from the actual graphics between the 2 cards. I notice it is a little better but not much. The store I bought it from made it sound like it was going to be night and day. The salesman said he personally owned this card (don't they always have that product at home what you are going to purchase?) and said I was in for a "real treat". Yeah, the game is much more playable but only because of the increase in FPS.

Any tweaks I might be able to do? I d/l the latest drivers (40.72 for you Geforce 4 owners) and wonder if maybe theres more out there. I keep antialiasing off because it messes with the in game chat letters (somehow fades them). Any tips and suggestions would be most appreciated so I can max out this small investment the best I can.

Thanks.

 

[JasenP]

I would find a forum or page dedicated to your particular brand of card. I have an ATI and I always go to Rage3D and poke around for tweaks and advice.
There are also settings in your BIOS that you can change. One thing that I did was create a "gaming" user on my XP machine. Basically, I have nothing load except the drivers that are needed to play the game. It works really well and is easier than shutting everything off manually.
-JP

 

[Jeffrey Itterly]

I've always thought that the reason for updating your graphic card was mainly for a FPS increase, thus enabling you to use the higher settings. The graphics will only be as good as the game will allow for. Wouldn't the quality of a person's monitor have just as much to do with it?

 

[Dave Sabo]

There are tons of settings that can be enabled that aren't enabled by default.
Personally I like to play with these settings to see what works best for me. Since the enhanced graphics will affect framerate, it's up to you to find the middle ground you are happy with.
First, check all your settings in BF1942 itself. For eye candy... enable 32bit color, antialiasing, max it all out. If you take big performance hits with everything max... start knocking down the settings 1 by 1 to find your sweet spot. Also, go to display properties-->advanced and check the settings in there (I'm at work or I'd give you better specifics)
Here's a "for instance". My game box is an xp1800, 512DDR, G4 4200 w/128. I run BF1942 in 1024x768 (higher res makes text too small), 16 bit color(big increase in performance compared to 32bit), and max everything else. At those settings, I'm always pinned to the max framerate of 90fps. Now, I'm sacrificing that ever-yummy 32bit color for performance because I'm more concerned with framrate and less lag for net games, especially for clan matches.
Sort of off topic - Michael, what's your BF name? If you want some good gaming drop by the --{A}--narchists Clan server (IP is 206.152.227.46). Always some good battles going on there. There's typically an admin around so TK'ers are usually handled quickly.
BTW - if you ever see The_Target--{A}-- , that's me

 

[MikeH1]

I'll be polishing my knife Dave
Actually I know about those BF1942 tweaks I have it, for the most part set where I think its good.
1024 X 768
audio I have at 22khz (sounds fine to me)
shadows, T & L are on
textures at 100%
main vid settings are at medium
32 bit colors
I just found a website www.Guru3D.com that pretty well answered all my questions. Lots of in depth stuff there. Check out this link for a great review on our video cards. Not only is it in depth but the reviewer explains the purpose of a lot of the little add ons like antialiasing and such.
http://www.guru3d.com/review/nvidia/geforce4ti/
New drivers were just released 3 days ago but I'm going to hold off until I'm sure that they have no major bugs and if the performance increase merrits the download.
I just finished overclocking my card, it was actually set to low by default I just squeezed an extra 20 Hz out of the core clock and a extra 50 Mhz out of the memory clock. Playing with some of the options on the vid card (and now I know which ones to adjust) should help.
Oh yeah my battlefield name is kitlope. I'm usually on the wolfserver but sometimes check out different ones on ASE. I'll drop by narchists (actually I have played on that once before I'm sure) and see if your around!