Reinstall HL2 after graphics card upgrade?

[ocoro02]

I'm running HL2 on a pretty minimum spec PC - Dell Dimension 4300 1.7GHz P4, 256Mb RAM, 64 Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE., DirectX 9.0a,b or c (tried all!).

Now I purchased an ATI (Sapphire) Radeon 9550 w/ 256Mb memory.

Play HL2 again - I can't achieve any video settings better than I did before with the 8500LE! I can just muster 1024x768 with pretty much lowest advanced settings and it's stuttering real bad. The 9550 is a pretty good card - surely I'd see a huge improvement over a 3 year old card?

I'm stuck with Windows ME and had some trouble installing any newer drivers for the new 9550 card. I've completely deinstalled and reinstalled the ATI stuff including using their utility to clean all ATI stuff off the computer. Question - do you think I have to reinstall Half-Life 2? Is it remembering the settings somehow from the 8500LE (i.e maybe it's only allocating 64b mem or something?).

 

[DrDevin]

Reformat would be a good option but many people dont have the windows CD or something so I would Uninstall all of your drivers and install motherboard driver, Direct X 9c, Catalyst 4.12 w/contolcenter and then soundcard or anything else. Make sure you dont have AA or AF set to a high level by mistake. You should be able to run the game at 1024x768 with all setting high without problems. Although your CPU isnt the fastest. You also might be able to delete the config files and let steam redownload them to see if it recognises your new card. Make backups!

 

[[Matt]]

Radeon 8500LE
Memory: 250MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 6.4BG/s

Radeon 9550
Memory: 200MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 8GB/s

Theres hardly any difference between the cards and thats the reason they perform almost the same. Other than seeing the extra DX9 effects, upgrading from a 8500le to a 9550 is a bit of a pointless upgrade... sorry.

 

[Vigilante]

ouch...

 

[bosox188]

That's kinda what I was thinking, but aren't the 9550's good overclockers?

 

[Mujuro]

You seriously should have gone with an 9600...

 

[The Terminator]

take it back if you can. get a 9600 pro with 128 mb mem and 256 bit interface.

 

[bosox188]

take it back if you can. get a 9600 pro with 128 mb mem and 256 bit interface.

They don't make 256-bit 9600 pro's.

 

[RTFMy]

take it back if you can. get a 9600 pro with 128 mb mem and 256 bit interface.

Wow..

 

[[Matt]]

They don't make 256-bit 9600 pro's.

^^^^^^

 

[ocoro02]

No no no - the 8500LE was one of the earlier ones with 64Mb mem, the 9550 is a 256 Mb card (not the original 128Mb one that came out earlier this, err, last year) . And was cheap, and has that nice o/c potential! I've got a feeling I need to increase RAM in the PC as well but don't really want to buy old legacy PC133 DIMM, aggh!
Actually the more I look at it I think the bulk of the problem may be the sound stuttering thing.

 

[Darkknighttt]

the amount of video ram doesn't really matter

 

[ocoro02]

Cheers folks. I've had some improvement by setting command line args "+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1" - the second I believe works round the sound threading issue, first- dunno It's pretty playable now anyhow
And after that - I'm running Win ME which is hopeless for any sort of driver upgrades now so am commandeering my ex-Fedora equipped Shuttle XPC which is faster anyhow. Don't know why I didn't think of this earlier -makes sense to use the fastest PC I have for games, duh.

 

[[Matt]]

No no no - the 8500LE was one of the earlier ones with 64Mb mem, the 9550 is a 256 Mb card (not the original 128Mb one that came out earlier this, err, last year) . And was cheap, and has that nice o/c potential! I've got a feeling I need to increase RAM in the PC as well but don't really want to buy old legacy PC133 DIMM, aggh!
Actually the more I look at it I think the bulk of the problem may be the sound stuttering thing.

Video ram doesnt matter unless you're playing at higher resolutions which you wont be doing on a 9550. Going from 64mb to 256Mb might add about 3-4 FPS more to your frame rate. In a lot of cases 256Mb will even slow down your gaming performance on that card! When buying a graphics card, dont look at how much memory it has. What you should look for is memory clock speed, core clock speed and the number of rendering pipelines...

And to correct an earlier mistake i edited my previous post giving out the card specs. I mixed up the 8500le and 9550 memory bandwidth. It seem the 9550's memory bandwidth is far worse! Whats the point of having 256Mb of ram if it cant use it?

 

[[Matt]]

Radeon 8500LE
Memory: 250MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 6.4BG/s

Radeon 9550
Memory: 200MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 8GB/s

should read as...

Radeon 8500LE
Memory: 250MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 8BG/s

Radeon 9550
Memory: 200MHz 128bit DDR
Core clock : 250MHz
Pixel pipelines : 4
Bandwidth: 6.4GB/s

 

[spidster]

you need to go get urself a x850xt platinum edition.

 

[[Matt]]

....or not