In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt Patrick Vervoorn
wrote:

In article .com,
Beladi Nasralla wrote:
I made a budget gaming computer -- AMD X2 Athlon 3600+ and 7600GT
(both overclocked). I ran Oblivion at playable framerates at almost
maximum settings. My colleague says that his new computer with 8800GTS
struggles to run Oblivion at maximum settings, and he wonders why I
can ran it on my computer. I run Bioshock at maximum settings, and the
game has no speed problems (that is, it runs at least at 20 fps). And
yet the reviews show that the high-end cards (like 1950Pro and 7900GT)
struggle to run the game at full settings.

You don't mention the resolution at which you are running Bioshock vs the
resolution at which your colleague is running it...?

Perhaps you also have a different view of what 'no speed problems' are?
While you may find Bioshock at 20fps to be acceptable, your colleague may
have a different view, and may find 30fps to be totally unacceptable...?

What is happening ? Maybe my GPU card is better what it is claimed to
be (it is a grey import from China). The other consideration is that
both mainboard and the GPU are from the same manufacturer, MSI, and
the mainboard has an nVidia cheapset (like the videocard). Maybe the
GPU and the mainboard have an improved compatibility, which results in
an improved performance ?

I don't think that changes much, if anything.

This looks less likely so, because I ran the tests Mark3D03 and
Mark3D05. It came out that the unoverclocked computer had a
performance at the bottom of the surveyed computer systems of the
equal specifications. After overclocking, my computer performed the
test very closely to the median of the similar systems they tested.

That gives ?

I think you're comparing apples to oranges... Try to find out what
resolution other people (or the benchmark results you're comparing to) run
at.

I also have a P4-2400 system with a 7600GT. It was quite capable of
running something like Half Life 2 or Bioshock at an acceptable framerate
when I was still using a CRT, and used a resolution like 800x600 or
1024x768 with quite a lot of the eye-candy enabled. However, when I
switched to a TFT, with a native resolution of 1680x1050, I noticed this
system had considerable problems rendering all these pixels with the same
quality settings I used before.

Funny:
I have a similar situation to what the person you replied to has.

*My* computer has an AMD 2400+ with 1-gig (2 sticks) PC3200 memory in it
and an ATI 2006 "All In Wonder" card running an LCD screen (using the
VGA connector) at 1680x1050 pixels. I'm running memory-speed of 200mhz,
FSB of 266, and 133 bus-speed.

*The kid* has a different make (and supposedly much *faster*)
motherboard, with matched 500meg (again, 1 gig) memory for 128-bit
access instead of 64-bit like mine (it *requires* matched sticks). That
PC has an AMD 2800+ CPU, and a later (supposedly faster) video board
(also from ATI) without the extra bells and whistles of the AIW card.
That system has a 21" monitor, which normally is run at 1600x1200.

So ... You'd *expect* that the kid's computer would walk all over mine.
Only instead, while playing World of Wonder, mine *screams* along at
full resolution and all settings at max; while the kid's computer has to
be backed-off in resolution and/or settings to get decent playing speed.

Go figure.

Sometime I'm going down there, taking along a copy of CPU-Z, and see if
the kid's memory settings or something is off. No way should mine walk
all over the kid's ... but it does. You'd think it would be the other
way around.

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