wrote:

Hello. I am wondering if something is wrong with my AMD Athlon 2200+
system (I don't overclock) when gaming with the newest games. You can
see my primary/gaming system specifications at:
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm.../computers.txt ... I am using
the latest updates for all my drivers, OS, etc.

In NVIDIA driver properties, I like to set High Quality (graphics),
Anisotropic to 8X and AA to 2X (sometimes disabled because of BF1942's
poor fonts). However, my newer games are not very smooth. Sometimes it
is sluggish (not too choppy) in C&C: Generals and BF1942. I use 1024x768
resolutions in them. Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (in
Red Hat Linux 7.2 with compiled Kernel 2.4.20) uses 1152x864 resolution.

I ran Wolfenstain under RH 7.2 using a P4 1.3GHz with 128MB RDRAM and a
64MB NVidia GeForce3 Ti 500 at a resolution of 1280x1024 and it was very
smooth, only dropping slightly at times. I had anisotropic filtering
off and no AA.

What is the bottleneck?

I noticed you have two different types/speed RAM in your machine.
Trying removing one and see how that works. 256Mb RAM is be enough to
work with Wolfenstein to make a comparison.

I don't really want to upgrade my CPU again so
soon. I only had it since October 2002. Video card is a maybe, but I
wonder if upgrading it to a GeForce4 Ti4600 (I heard FX aren't great and
ATI has poor Linux driver support) will make a big difference. I also
had the video card since October 2002.

I have a Ti4600 and it wasn't the huge improvement over the Ti500 that I
expected.

What do you think? Thank you in advance.

My only are thoughts are to make sure that your settings are optimised
in the BIOS.

Also, make sure your CPU is running at the speed it should be.
Sometimes your BIOS can be a problem, in which case it will need to be
flashed.