Direct 3D: Please help

[BrandtP]

Here's my system:

P3 733 MHz
256 MB RAM
SB Live Value
Tyan Trinity 400 Motherboard (VIA with latest 4 in 1)
Geforce 2 Pro (using latest Nvidia drivers)

1. I recently posted that I was getting a slowdown in Dungeon Siege, however poor performance in Direct 3D has happened in othe D3D games including Thief
and Halflife (yes I know Open GL would probably work better in the latter). In Thief and HL I would get this brief pause after every 5th or 7 th step. The framerates until this pause would be fine. A similar problem occurs in
Dungeon Siege, where about every 10 th step there's a slight slowdown, sometimes not as often. In DS the slowdown is most noticable amongst the
scenery, while the character animations tend to be smooth. I will say the pause does not occur with an access of the hard drive. Now I can understand
that with my lower end system I may not get optimal performance out of DS,
but with this system I would think Thief and HL would run with no problems. How can I improve my D3D performance?

Here's what I've tried:

Updating to DirectX 8.1
Installing the latest Nvidia drivers
Installing latest 4 in 1 drivers
Turning off AGP 4x in BIOS
Verified Video BIOS shadow was disabled in the BIOS

2. I can't afford a Mobo/CPU upgrade until later. What sort of upgrade would help? I was thinking about getting a Pentium 3 1064 MHz, as that's the fastest my current board could handle, I assume the extra horsepower
would show some improvement.

TIA,

Brandt

 

[Unolocogringo]

Make sure in the bios that you have the boot seguence for AGP or in some AGP/PCI.

Next set your AGP Appeture to 64mb. Above 64mb Can cause problems with win/9x ME.Set memory cache mode to USWC.

Defragment your harddrive. Then Start,settings,control pannel,System. Click the performance tab. click VIRTUAL MEMORY.Let me specify my own. Set it to 500minimum, 500max on the fastest hard drive you have. C drive if possible.

Now run the 4in1 setup again. But this time remove all drivers. Now reinstall 4in1 with AGP in turbo mode. Reenable Agp4x.Shadowing video rom bios makes the comp boot faster.

These are all of the basic things I can think of to check.

I aint signing nothing!!!

 

[prfstrkr]

atually try disabling big applications when playing games/delete the ones that you seldom use would be best!

Or you can try override your own defined resolution in Directx setup to see if it helps.

Never fight stupid person.
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=17357" target="_new">Rig</A>

 

[prfstrkr]

atually try disabling big applications when playing games/delete the ones that you seldom use would be best!

Or you can try override your own defined resolution in Directx setup to see if it helps.

Never fight stupid person.
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=17357" target="_new">Rig</A>

 

[slickstaa]

one more tweek since we seem to be listing them here.....go to control panel\system\perfomance tab...then click on file system. set "typical role of this computer" to network server, which will give u an all around speed increase.