Bottlenecking?

[Jsears31]

Hi everyone. I've been dealing with a few frustrations and could use some of your opinions. I've been struggling with framerates for a while now, and since i've spent quite a bit of money on my system, it's starting to bug me.

While some games play flawlessly at full resolutions (half-life 2, Doom3, Quake4, Prey, etc.) Most just don't play as well as I think they should. Can anyone see where my system might be bottlenecking? Perhaps the RAM? Is 2 gigs starting to be on the low side? I tend to run in a resolution of 1600X1200.

Maybe the Crossfire is just too much a pain to deal with? Or maybe the developers just don't program very well...

Anyway, any advice on the best way to upgrade my system is appreciated. Thanks!

------My Specs---------
AMD 2.6 ghz dual core Opteron.
2 ATI 256 mb 1800xt in Crossfire
2 gigs 666 mhz RAM
Windows XP Service pack 2

 

[Joe_The_Dragon]

dual core sempron? do you have a low end sempron or amd x2 dual core?

 

[Jsears31]

My bad. It's a dual core Opteron. I got my rons mixed up.

 

[Joe_The_Dragon]

what MB do you have and is it a am2 cpu?

 

[Jsears31]

Honestly I forget the exact model, but it's a crossfire 3200 AM2 socket motherboard. 2 16x PCI express slots. Supports (I believe) up to 4 gigs of RAM. Thanks.

 

[andybird123]

the motherboard, CPU and RAM are all fine to very good for gaming, it's the graphics cards that are the bottleneck in your machine

1800XT Crossfire starts to struggle with FEAR so any game produced after that is likely to start seeing problems... which games specifically are running with problems?

also, the 256mb of VRAM will also be a limiting factor - the games that ARE having issues, do they run better if you set the Texture Quality to medium but all other settings to high?

there are several games out that require >256mb to use the Highest texture setting and you'll see serious chop trying to run them on a card(s) with only 256

 

[Jsears31]

Yeah FEAR struggles. However that game struggles with a lot of setups. I'm finding that games made with certain engines run fine, where others struggle. Perhaps it's the normal mapping in new games which require the massive amounts of texture memory. It's just hard for me to admit that it's the cards doing the bottlenecking. I mean come on, there are two of them (this is frustrated sarcasm on my part).

So I'm guessing that games optimized for Crossfire will run great, where others might struggle... I might just break down and go for the geforce 8800.

Any other opinions are open. Does anyone know how much better a single geforce 8800 compares to my Crossfire setup? Thanks again.