You mentioned you had the following:
Celeron 2.8GHz
768MB
Old card ATi 9250 256MB 40fps (single car) 10-25fps (with other cars)
New card Nvidia 6600GT 256M
You haven't mentioned what bus your cards use PCI, AGP or PCI-E? and what are the fps you get now? What is the operating system you have installed? Did you change any settings in LFS in regards to graphics?
Some other questions that come to my mind regarding performance on your setup... does your motherboard support dual channel memory configs? as im guessing you must have 3x 256M or 1x 512 and 1x 256?
Bot of my cards are AGP cards, and as i said i'm getting the same FPS now as I did with my old card (40 single car, 10-25 more cars). I did not change any graphic settings:
Res: 1152*864 (32 bit)
Half Texture sice: Yes
HVS: On
Simple Car: Off
Haze effect: Yes
I don't know if my motherboard support dual channel memory configs, but i'm using 1*256RAM and 1*512RAM.
Yep that does seem abit odd that your not seeing ANY increase in performance then you still didn't mention OS (is it WinXP? cause it is memory and cpu hungry)
Things that come to mind to try or invetigate
1. Is the memory you have both the same rating? (if one is slower than the other you might be better off without the slower one)
2. Check in your bios setup for AGP settings and see if they are correctly configured.
3. How many other programs are running when you use LFS? Try closing down as many as you can through the task manager.
4. Check you computer for trojens, viruses, spyware, adware, etc...
5. Play with some settings in LFS try: under Graphics -
Disable rubber - all
Disable flags - all
Disable trees - all
Simple wheels - mirror or all
Shadow type - low res or off
Enable dither - no
Half texture - no
Mip filter - no
HVS - on
Z-Buff - 16 or 24
Simple track - off
Haze effect - Yes or No under Misc -
Multiplayer Speedup - yes
Multiplayer car Draw - 150m or less
6. If you change all the settings for your video card to get best performance is there any increase in fps over settings from max quality?
Thats about all I can think of at the moment... and its 1am so bed time
Hope you get some improvement, I wouldn't have thought the poor performance was just due to the Celeron
wow, i hate compputers.. Im trying to get this card working (geforce fx5500 256mb agp) and ive got the drivers and everything installed but its not working, and it says in the device manager 'the device cannot find any free input/output resources to use' Can anyne help me possibly quickly.
I have agp 2.0 and it says it works fine with it, I know its supposed to even on the nvidia site it said it should work. I dont know what i/o device its talking about. pleease help
Tell me the exact manufacturer and model names of you motherboard and new card and I'll see what I can dig up. Also what other cards do you have in your system? maybe try take some out and then see if the video card installs...
in the device manager under properties and in the resources tab it tells me whats conflicting with the card.. and I have no idea wtf it means but it sounds like have to to flash bios or something.
It says
Memory Range 00000000 - 00FFFFFF used by:
Motherboard resources
Memory Range 00000000 - 00FFFFFF used by:
System board extension for ACPI BIOS
Memory Range 00000000 - 0FFFFFFF used by:
Motherboard resources
Memory Range 00000000 - 0FFFFFFF used by:
System board extension for ACPI BIOS
Memory Range 00000000 - 0001FFFF used by:
System board extension for ACPI BIOS
You've given me enough info for the video card but not the motherboard, open the case and read the info directly off the motherboard (it's the largest board in the case ) I need the manufaturer and model number as a minimum.
[edit]Do you know how to get into the cmos setup? Sometimes there is an option to reallocate system resouces on restart...[/edit]
[edit2]found this on evga support...
6) Check the video card IRQ. First make sure your bios has an IRQ assigned to the Video card. Check your motherboard manual for more information on the bios. Most (if not all) modern motherboards will have this on by default. Make sure there is NOTHING in the PCI slot adjacent to the AGP slot. Go to your control panel and find the "System" icon (it will be under "Performance and Maintanence" if you are in the default Catagory view) . From the System Properties go to the "Hardware" tab and click on the "Device Manager" button. Now type ALT-V and then "N" to view resources by connection. Scroll down until you find the listing for the video card. Take note of what IRQ it is on. Now see what other devices are on that same IRQ. Inform us of all the devices on that IRQ. You may be able to disable them without affecting the PC by right clicking on the device and clicking DISABLE. Make sure you know what those devices are before you disable them. With XP you cannot change IRQs if you have an ACPI PC. A reinstall of XP might be required if an IRQ conflict is determined to be the problem.
If you can follow the instructions above and see if there is an IRQ assigned and if there is a conflict...
The conflicts you list above are memory conflicts which possibly can be resolved by clearing the cmos (bios settings) then rebooting. See your motherboard manual for how to do this (its normaly done via a jumper on the motherboard).
Hopefully you can get the motherboard details and i can investigate that side of things too... [/edit]
i cant find anything on the motherboard, i looked in sisoft and cpuz but it shows nothing. system bios us american megatrends inc. 0aavwp02 but that probably doesnt help. Under mainboard it says MP APIC as 'NO'
[edit]Sorry m8 I'll probably miss you today, as I've got to goto sleep shortly (4am start tomorrow it's gonna kill me I haven't done day shift for months and are used to sleeping in till late ) Anyway from what you've said and what I've read about similar problems on several forums, I'm afraid it sounds like the most likely solution will be to clear your bios setting (clear cmos jumper on motherboard) then format your hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch, as it appears that is the only way XP will reallocate resources correctly with mortherboard of the ACPI type. Which is not a 5min job [/edit]
Hmm..Maybe? Is there anyway i can check this? Or change it?
"You still didn't mention OS (is it WinXP? cause it is memory and cpu hungry)"
Yep its XP.
"1. Is the memory you have both the same rating? (if one is slower than the other you might be better off without the slower one)"
I tried to take out the slower one (256MB) but then my comp. wouldnt start up....So i had to put it back in again.
"2. Check in your bios setup for AGP settings and see if they are correctly configured."
I've been into the BIOS, but i couldnt find anything related to AGP settings....Maybe this could have been easier through MSN?
"3. How many other programs are running when you use LFS? Try closing down as many as you can through the task manager."
I have closed all the programs i know i can shut down, but still quite a lot programs are running. But they don't use much comp. power.
"4. Check you computer for trojens, viruses, spyware, adware, etc..."
I'm doing that all the time....Norton Internet Security and AD-Aware is used regulary.
"5. Play with some settings in LFS try:
under Graphics -
Disable rubber - all
Disable flags - all
Disable trees - all
Simple wheels - mirror or all
Shadow type - low res or off
Enable dither - no
Half texture - no
Mip filter - no
HVS - on
Z-Buff - 16 or 24
Simple track - off
Haze effect - Yes or No
under Misc -
Multiplayer Speedup - yes
Multiplayer car Draw - 150m or less
"
This made my gain aprox 2 fps average with no cars on screen.
"6. If you change all the settings for your video card to get best performance" is there any increase in fps over settings from max quality?
Nope.
But because i got a better result on the 3D mark test than my old card, it feels like its LFS that can'd detect my card or somthing. Or is it just my stupid Celeron that just can't do it? Bah.... Hate this. But thx for the help
audimasta, my opinion still stands that it is your Celeron processor and just like me, you won't get any FPS benefit from min to max graphics options. The gfx card will just let you look at a prettier screen. I have the same with the 2.5 GHz P4. It will be interesting if I end up replacing the board and CPU in my system as I'd be stuck with still using my pci Radeon 9250 graphics since I'm broke. So, next week, I may be using an Athalon 64 3700 with the same graphics card and let you know.
Once again, since you obviously didn't read it the first time... According to you, I would have to run LfS with all details off at 640x480, which just ISN'T TRUE...
Maybe this wasnt a big suprise, but my AGP-port is set to 4X. I can see this in the nVidia control centre.... I have been in the Bios and tried to find out where to change from 4X to 8X, but i cant find it. Is it a guide or something that i can read to find it? Do you guys think that this is the solution? Sorry i'm not that much into this...
I skimmed through all this, so if anything I say is a repeat, sorry, I'm lazy.
First off, LFS is all about them mhz. Video card memory has nothing to do with it, unless you are going from 32mb to about 128mb. Anything above 128mb on AGP is almost useless, I think the AGP bus can't use any more than 132ish mb. As for the PCI bus, It's something like 50mb. PCI-E is the future, as it's twice as fast as AGP, so it can use all of the 256mb and some. If you are only playing LFS, make sure you get a card with a high GPU speed, as that will make more of a difference than memory. The speed of the AGP slot is also important, when I had my old gateway, it only had a 2x slot. Came with a TNT2 32mb stock, but I took my Ti4200 128mb and set it up just for kicks... The 4200 actually did worse then the TNT2.
To who ever started this thread, the only way I can see you getting double the frames is if the FX5600 was on the PCI bus, and the FX5500 was on AGP. And since it's a dell, that is very well possible.
And last but not least, for my FX5700LE 256mb, my 9800pro blew up and that was the best/cheapest/best performance replacement I could find. Got it for $40 canadian .
****I would never buy this card, or any other FX series card new.****
I here you. I wonder how an Athalon XP compares with a P4 then? Also, you have to take into concideration your bus speed compared to mine or the Celeron. Mine is only 533 MHz. The final thing is my 512 MB ram compared to your 768 MB and what speed is your ram. Again, mine is the slowest DDR ram at 266 MHz. So it's quite possible you surpass me in specs because of the more ram and the AMD 1800 being faster than a 2.5 P4? I don't know. I've just read everywhere that Athalon XP's are better than Pentium 4's, but don't know what speeds would be the equivelents to compare. I do know I get the same performace as my brother-in-law who runs an Athalon mobile XP 1600 with nVidia onboard 32 MB graphics on a laptop. He has faster ram, but the same amount, 512 MB. So, to me it sounds like your XP 1800 is better than my P4 2.5. Which also tells me that you would smoke the Celeron 2.8, which leads me to continue my opinion that the Celeron 2.8 is the problem and he won't gain performance in FPS by upgrading graphics from the 9250 to the 6600GT. I'm curious, bbman, do you gain any FPS by just reducing ingame graphics or changing down to a lower resolution? Like I said, I don't even if I minimize everything and drop to 800x600x16. Still the same 35-45 FPS.
Ultimately in LFS the AMD PR rating vs P4 GHz doesn't quite match.
In "real world" apps a 2.5 GHz P4 would destroy an Athlon XP 1800+
In LFS, with the Athlon's much better floating point power (which makes me wonder... does LFS take advantage of SSE2? I'd think that would give huge gains to P4 performance) simply walks all over the P4.
The Athlon XP 1800+ uses a FSB of 266 MHz (DDR), or PC2100 RAM. That means that both your bus and the Athlon bus are running at the same speed (133 MHz) but yours is "quad pumped" to make 533 MHz while the Athlon is still only double data rate, or again, 266 MHz.
BTW, the slowest DDR is actually PC1600, which runs at 100 MHz (200 MHz DDR), which both the original Athlon and the first DDR based P4 used.
Ebiggs, honestly your CPU is still your biggest problem. I'd consider the 1700+ a real minimum, and that runs at 1.46 GHz. Not to mention it's an XP, which is then again some better then the clasic Athlons.
you still didn't mention OS (is it WinXP? cause it is memory and cpu hungry) 
. 