Radeon 9800XT bottleneck (but only in OpenGL)

[Surgery]

I bought the new card for my (admittedly terrible) system in the hopes of faster gameplay -- now it's creating more headaches than a hammer to the skull. Full-3D games run fine for five, ten minutes, then begin to lag for a few seconds, then run fine for say half a minute, lag again and so on. It only does this for Open GL (I don't want to use D3D because the performance really suffers -- it doesn't seem to bottleneck with this though). Any ideas?

Computer:
1.4ghz Pentium 4
512 megs (PC133) RAM
Radeon 9800XT
Intel 82801BA(M) ICH2X/M - AC'97 Audio Controller (onboard)
Intel 845 Chipset

 

[Vascular]

What game are you playing?

That is a weird configuration with pc133 on a 845 chipset. I thought that chipset used pc2700(ddr266).

 

[Surgery]

It's any 3D game. And yeah, it wasn't a shop-bought computer, I guess someone put cheapo memory in (I checked with AIDA32 and it lists it as PC133).

 

[Vascular]

Are you using the latest drivers for your chipset and graphics board. Also in game you should let the game pick witch format it will use as it usually knows the best to use.

 

[the_guru]

ATI cards are better at DirectX.
Nvidia cards are better at OpenGL.

 

[Surgery]

All the latest drivers, and my old, old graphics card (Radeon FSC) ran Open GL fine... using D3D on this new Radeon isn't my favourite since the performance seems to degrade markedly.

 

[tenaciousleydead]

well what games are you playing? and the slight lag could be due to hitching of the harddrive (not enoguh system memory) when do oyu plan to buy some new hardware?

 

[Surgery]

No, it's not the hard drive I don't think, because it never did this with the old card. I'm not playing intensive games even, just Counter-Strike and similar that aren't graphically demanding.

 

[tenaciousleydead]

well i dont know only thing i can say is your system is waayy old, but i think i have the same thing it just lags every 5 secs i dont know i just live with it.

 

[Surgery]

You don't have onboard (Intel maybe?) sound do you? My friend mentioned that he had the same problem till he got a new soundcard and added more memory.

 

[tenaciousleydead]

no as you can see in my sig i use amds but i do use ac 97 onboard sound but im pretty sure my cpu is fast enough to recover from the lost cpu cycles but i dont know i noticed that nvidia chipsets use extremely more memory than my other via chipset it was insane. i didnt notice but it might have gone away when i found a sound card and put it in. then i think i killed it becuase i didnt have an fsb lock on my mobo and my sound just stopped working. thats when all my stuffs been kinda buggy.

 

[Surgery]

It seems like the AC97 is the problem, because I have that too. Onboard sound apparently screws ATI cards up.

 

[Vascular]

Make sure you have D3D sound and EAX sound turned off in the sound settings. I used to have the same problem with red faction on an old machine.

To test if there is a confict disable the onboard sound in the bios and run the game.

 

[Surgery]

Yeah, both those are disabled... I'll try turning down the level of acceleration under Windows audio devices.

 

[ElMoIsEviL]

i845 used PC133 SDRAM
i845D used PC2100 (266DDR) DDR
i845PE used PC2700/3200 (333/400DDR) DDR

There were other versions of the chipset but the first i845 used SDRAM.

Lemme highlight the problems..

Computer:
1.4ghz Pentium 4
512 megs (PC133) RAM
Radeon 9800XT
Intel 82801BA(M) ICH2X/M - AC'97 Audio Controller (onboard)
Intel 845 Chipset

Your video card is being severly limited by this system. Mainly the FSB. You're using some VERY slow memory with a processor that has a 400MHz FSB (Quad Pumped 100MHz). This severly limits the memory bandwidth available to the hungry Pentium 4 processor. To make matters worse you're only feeding it 512MB of ram, far too little for todays games (hell BF2 needs 1.5-2GB to run without issues).

I'm assuming your processor is a socket 423 design? Could even be socket 478 given the fact it uses the i845 (which came out in both socket flavours).

If it's a socket 478 processor, then I would suggest you purchase a used Asus P4G8x (Dual channel PC2100) and two sticks of 512MB PC3200 (they're pretty cheap nowadays).

This would at least feed your processor enough bandwidth while your onboard audio would be based on a Realtek ALC650 6-channel AC'97 solution, which is known to work well with games.

Ebay - Asus P4G8x slightly used

 

[Surgery]

You know what, I figured out what was causing it to lag up (turned out it DID lag in Direct 3D). The reason was...


No processor fan. I opened it up, took off the cover over the processor, and there's a big blank space where a fan should be sitting. What you talked about made sense though, games don't run nearly as well as they should (ESPECIALLY in multiplayer -- even the original Counter-Strike is only running at 40/50 FPS). Good idea about the 478 processor, thanks for all the input. I'll get the Asus as soon as I can.