BF2S Forums Lowest Settings + 9800xt = 20 Fps?

My old 9700pro got 45+fps with a P4 2.53,1gig 533 rdram at 1024x768. Much better at 800x600 though. So my guess is that you have programs in the background lagging the game up. Try here-> http://gear.ign.com/articles/626/626714p2.html

Do u have MSN or any other chat programs because i find that they cause my pc to lag when using both

I recently had Windows die on me. Following a good reinstall, BF2 seems to be running much better. I have a 9800XT w/ Athlon64 3200, 1GB PC3200. If you don't want to go to that, I would suggest you kill off Gaim while playing (last I checked, it was using about 26MB of memory), kill off all unnecessary services (Right-click My Computer->Manage->Services and Applications->Services) and run a good spyware/adware scan. Also, defrag your hard drive (not so much for FPS, but good to do occasionally) and take a look at what's in your Startup folder in your Start Menu. Also, kill everything you can that is running in the notification area. A lot of real memory hogs can be hanging out down there. Steam and the EA Downloader both tend to run at around 20MB of memory usage just sitting there.

I close everything I can and have minimal services running. Since I don't have any other Windows machines on the network that I need to share files with, I don't run the Computer Browser service. I turned off all the wireless stuff since this thing does have a wireless nic. Security Center is gone. Secondary Logon and Fast User Switching is off. All of that stuff. I don't even run Antivirus on here because I do all of my web stuff in Linux. My Windows install is only there for BF2 and the rare times my wife needs to write a paper for school in Word (for grammar check).

A note on the killing services, if you see something you don't know about, do a google on the name of the service.

Oh yeah, one final thing. I use the drivers from omegadrivers.net. Have for a long time and get a pretty sizable increase in performance. I've also heard that HT can hurt game performance, so go into your BIOS and disable it and see if that helps at all. Best of luck!

Last edited by Rugmonster (2006-04-12 17:37:15)

hmm definitely buttseks cuz thats obviously a problem with my computer. but thanks for trying. I will try turning off gaim, HT and all that random stuff you told me to do.  but IMHO probably wont do much. i have reformated to no avail. i didnt get any boost in frames or anything.

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE 9800XT...TELL ME
- what processor you have (AMD/INTEL)
- your settings for BF2
- and your frames (renderer.drawfps 1  in the in-game console)

oh yeah... for omega drivers... can i install the omega drivers over my cat 6.3?

i got a 9550 in one comp and even it gets 35 fps.

put another gig of ram in mate if that dont work you need to look at your settings if i was you.

RAM shouldn't be an issue with FPS, it only really effects loading times.

I definetely agree with trying to get rid of some stuff in the background, as this is probably the cause.
Its not so much about how much memory it uses, rather than how many processes your CPU is doing in the backgorund.
Go into taskmanager and into the processes tab and post how many you have going, that should tell us whether you have too many or not. Just as a guideline anything over 35 processes is quite high unless you have a super powerful CPU (which you have not- no offense intended).

depends how much ram you have really, if you have a stupidly low amount  it will obviously be a problem.
but as far as i know having 1 GB of RAM will not limit your graphics performance, its the processor and GPU that are the causes.
For example i know 2 guys in our clan, who both have 1gb of ram but they have decent AMD processors (always go AMD for gaming) and they both have fairly mid-lower range GPU's and they have no problems at all with running BF2 on mid-low settings and getting a solid 30-40 FPS.

I would definetely look towards the proccessor in this instance as it looks more likely to be the issue.
The reason i say "go AMD for games" is that raw processing power (what intel go for) doesn't really matter unless your trying to do video editing, rendering all that type of stuff.
All benchmark tests show that the AMD equilavent processor of Intel's are always better in games.
64 bit processors also help when it comes to gaming, as they offer "blistering performance in 32 bit applications" (quote taken from AMD website).
I see all too often when people say "oooh look at my 3.6GHZ Intel, it owns" when in actual fact the same AMD processor would run at only 2.2-2.4 GHZ and would completely piss all over it in games.

Dont get the 1300. Go 7800 gs for agp.

mjw wrote:

RAM shouldn't be an issue with FPS, it only really effects loading times.

That's not completely true.  It is much faster to access RAM than it is to read from a harddrive.  The more RAM you have to more information you can store at one time.  BF2 seems to perform the best with at least 2 GB of RAM.

Windows takes up at least a few hundred MB of RAM just to function, GAIM will take a little more, all those other processes running in the background add up to having just a few hundred MB of RAM left for BF2.

The biggest thing you'll notice once you upgrade to 2 or more GB of RAM is that verification loading times drop dramatically, as well as the initial stutter disappears or is present for a shorter time at the beginning of a round.

Another thing that will hamper your framerate is using onboard sound.  Are you using onboard sound or a soundcard?  Once I installed a soundcard, my framerate jumped a dozen frames per second (and the sound was much better.)

So upgrade to 2 GB of RAM and get a soundcard if you don't already have one.

REYKON wrote:

i use gaim (third party aim) while in game. nothing else.

Add some ram and kill gaim.

Random question -- what is your AGP aperture set to in your BIOS? I have an NVidia card, so YMMV, but when I upped the aperture from 32MB to 256MB on mine, performance improved noticeably. I have a 512MB card and 2GB of RAM, so you probably don't want to go to 256MB aperture -- 128MB is probably closer to ideal for you.