Wow, I need to make new categories. Everything seems to be going under “other.”
As the title suggests, I now have a new graphics card – an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT to be precise. I ran the benchmarks and I’m in awe. What I had prior to this upgrade was the onboard pathetic excuse for a GPU – an ATI Radeon Xpress 200.
Here are the numbers, for those interested. Tests on the recommended settings are marked R, tests on the maximum settings are marked M. All tests were performed at 1024×768 resolution.
Onboard:
Lost Cost R: 11.52 fps
Lost Cost M: 4.75 fps
CS:S R: 16.80 fps
CS:S M: 8.11 fps
New card:
Lost Cost R: 66.67 fps
Lost Cost M: 50.43 fps
CS:S R: 116.71 fps
CS:S M: 58.98 fps
All of the tests performed at maximum settings, regardless of game or card, had artifacts which I think were missing textures. I think that means I need more RAM, but it’s not like I play with maxed settings anyway. The new card got 10.6 times better on Lost Cost maxed. The smallest multiplier was 5.8 for Lost Cost recommended.
I also inadvertently stumbled across something interesting. Prior to all my testing, I had disabled Windows’ pagefile, which is where Windows uses the hard drive as auxiliary RAM. I didn’t turn it back on when I started the test, and ran both tests on Lost Cost without the pagefile. It scored slightly higher on the recommended setting test with 13.94 fps, but then crashed on the maxed out test, near the end where the soldier blows up the door. I assume this was because I simply ran out of physical RAM and there was no place for the additional textures to go, or something. What I find interesting is that something like this would be implemented so that, while it does improve stability, it also hampers performance, which is somewhat frustrating. That’s Windows for you…