Video Card setting help

[code911]

Greetings and Salutations,

I just purchased and installed a Palit Nvidia 6600GT 256mb card to replace my Asus ATI 9600xt 128mb card.  I expected to see some improvements but don't.  In fs2004, everything tends to looks blurry.  If I use the farcry profile (in nvdia settings) its a little better but still not as good as the ATI card.

I haven't had a Nvidia card in years so I'm assuming that its settings somewhere that need to be changed.

Any help will be appreciated.  

Thanks

Charlie

System specs: Abit NF7-S 2.0 mobo, AMD 3000+, 1gb DDR400 memory, WD1200 hard drive, 550watt powersupply

[4_Series_Scania]

You need to remove all traces of your previous ATI drivers, use a program such as The Catalyst Uninstaller   then, to be on the safe side, remove the Nvidia drivers you've currently got installed.

Use Detonator Destroyer   to do this, then, finally, download the current Nvidia 84.21 drivers.

You should then be sorted sir.

[code911]

Great..thanks I'll try that

Charlie

[congo]

I use a 6600GT and it's quite powerful in comparson to a 9600XT.

What I do is set my graphics quality in the driver settings manually and globally, everything gets displayed at the same high quality, I don't use profiles.

When you install nVidia drivers, some automated programs are enabled in the startup and a new service is activated. I disable these and remove the service.

Once that is done I right click the desktop, go to properties/settings/advanced and then click on the 6600GT tab. Make sure the profile is set to global driver settings and choose "Advanced Settings" in the view box.

Experiment with the AA and AF filtering settings to obtain the best quality/FPS ratio that suits you, (I use 2 or 4x AA and 8 or 16x AF and set "Image Settings" to the highest quality with the slider. Everything else I leave at default. No doubt some applications will benefit with custom profiles, but I find the above settings work well with all my 3D programs.

Palit and Expertvision are the same company I believe and I've read good and bad about them. I've never owned one and have had reservations about ordering them on a couple of occasions as they often appear at an attractive price point in the marketplace. One lesson that I've learned over the years is that a "cheap" video card needs to be treated with suspicion.

Another thing is that your card has 256mb of ram fitted, and this immediately gets my shackles up because the card is usually fitted with 128mb of onboard ram.

With video cards, more ram sets off alarm bells, particularly if the card is cheap, because the quality of the additional ram is invariably inferior. If a video card has more ram it should definitely be higher priced than the "standard" version, or you should assume the card has inferior ram fitted unless specs show otherwise.

I'm not saying your card is inferior, I'm just very suspicious of it because of the added ram..... it may be quite a decent card after all. The ram chips fitted to the card have a latency figure in their specification that determines the quality. The lower the latency, the better the quality. This takes a bit of research to sort out what you have and it's relative performance in the scheme of things. Typically, manufacturers will use different ram chips on the same model card due to availability. Also, the suppliers of that ram may label "better" chips as lesser quality if they are getting a high yield of quality chips at that period in their production process. So, it's possible that a card with a lesser ram specification may in fact be able to run a bit faster.

Another thing that determines video card performance is the clock speeds set by the manufacturer through the card's bios. If a video card has slower clock settings than it's near competitor's cards, chances are they slowed the card down because of performance issues.

I haven't researched many video cards in detail lately. I'm just making you aware of the fact that there are several little known considerations when it comes to video card selection. Another safeguard is the 6600GT standard requires certain performance criteria be met before the card is certified as a 6600GT and able to use the name legally under license from nVidia. So, at worst, it should still perform as good as the base 6600GT standard.

[code911]

Thank Congo.  This is the card that I have  http://www.palit.com.tw/en/products/nvvga_6600gt.html#spec

Something has changed in the system because now the images aren't blurry but now the system locks up after a few minutes, no BSOD, ctrl-alt-del can't get out of it...have to reset.  My other programs don't seem to have this issue (BF2, Halo, Full Spectrum Warrior).  I'm thinking it maybe just time to backup everything, dump the drive and start clean.  Just hate doing it cause no matter how I try to remember to back things up I always forget something really good  ;)

Thanks again

[congo]

Consider a second drive or partioning the one you have, it sure makes a re-install a lot less painful.

I've been having a hard time getting the memory specs for that video card.

[code911]

Well...I've messed around with a ton of different drivers and settings but nothing seems to work.  Going to try and RMA it back to the seller...but you know how that works on ebay sometimes.  Put my ati9600xt back in and everything works like a charm even though I've got to turn some of the eye candy down a little

Thanks for everyone's help.

Charlie