Welcome to Thunderdome

GORDON wrote:Oops, I have a 4800. My bad. Brainfarted.

Wanna sell the old one? My wife needs a new video card. Voodoo5 just is too pussy for me.

mbilderback wrote:

GORDON wrote:Oops, I have a 4800. My bad. Brainfarted.

Wanna sell the old one? My wife needs a new video card. Voodoo5 just is too pussy for me.

Pay for half the cost of the new one, and done.

Someone actually bought the Voodoo5?

mbilderback wrote:Ok, it's not that I need more RAM. Here's the issue. When a game is programmed, it's set to put certain things into memory, prioritized by what's accessed more often, what's needed most, etc. You could load the entire game into physical memory, but that would require you to have about 500mb above and beyond the entire size of the program, not very practical. So, it's programmed only to put certain things into memory. This is where they get their minimum memory requirements. As you load more and more stuff, it will only start removing stuff from memory if it starts to run out of space, that's why programs run better with more memory. Now, if you want HDD access not to matter at all during game-play with current developed games, you would have to make a 2GB or so RAMDRIVE out of the system memory, leaving some amount over 256 free for system resources. At that point, you would basically copy the entire game over into that ramdrive and then run it from there. That would COMPLETELY eliminate the HDD access from the gameplay, but until then, you will continue to load pieces of the game and swap pieces of the game to and from the HDD as you play.


Ok, rant over. The point is, with modern games, the more RAM the better, and it's more important than HDD. But you cannot ignore the fact that faster read/write times to your HDD will become more and more important. And he asked where the bottleneck would be after buying a new video card, and probably at that point, his issue would be in HDD read/write operations.

GORDON wrote:

mbilderback wrote:

GORDON wrote:Oops, I have a 4800. My bad. Brainfarted.

Wanna sell the old one? My wife needs a new video card. Voodoo5 just is too pussy for me.

Pay for half the cost of the new one, and done.

Someone actually bought the Voodoo5?

All that. . . has nothing to do with frame rate. There is no FPS or other game that is going to use the hard drive as part of the graphics rendering engine.

I would bet a million dollars that his hard drive will not be the part of his computer that keeps his video card from reaching it's full potential. If it is. . . . he needs more RAM.

mbilderback wrote:

All that. . . has nothing to do with frame rate. There is no FPS or other game that is going to use the hard drive as part of the graphics rendering engine.

I would bet a million dollars that his hard drive will not be the part of his computer that keeps his video card from reaching it's full potential. If it is. . . . he needs more RAM.

Ok, let me break this down a bit further. As games become more robust, including more and more things like character models, it becomes a physical impossibility for 99% of machines out there to load all of the video graphics you may come in contact with initially. So take for instance, you walk into a room with 50 other character models in it, different polygon settings and different texture mappings. Most games will load all 50 of those models as you step into the room causing the hesitation to be during your movement in. Now, if another modeled object moves into the same room and you see it, the system will then have to access that model from the HDD, since it hasn't already been loaded into system memory or video memory. At that point, your system will seem to drop to an insanely low framerate as the view freezes until the textures and models load. Now, in some games, this can be 400 different models, and as you walk into the room, it loads them as you see them, making some rooms impossible to maneuver through. Fixed by, and only by, faster HDD access times.

Defragging your drive can often help that alot. I noticed similar problems in heavily congested areas in SWG. Of course, loading the info from their servers was even worse than from your hard drive (though it was a combination in the game) and the frame rates would often drop to 5 fps for a little while until it caught up.

Absolutely. But to me, it's a band-aid. If you want a truly top-o-d-line system for gaming, you have to have serial ATA RAID-5 or SCSI RAID-5. And since SCSI is better than SATA and you'd have to buy all new HDDs anyway....

TheCatt wrote:Although, drive-striping without redundancy (Raid 0) would actually give you better performance, mbb.

Cakedaddy wrote:But if you're doing all this for performance, why not go all the way?