Ian.W

Hi everyone

my new PCs specs. Dell dimension 8400
3ghz pentium 4 (loadsa other numbers i dont know of my head)
512mb ram
ATI radeon x300 graphics card

thats about the main stuff

on normal AFP i can get anywere between 150-260fps on photoreal sceneries and about 90-160 on 3D sceneries

could it handle it?

Ian

PCPhill

X300SE would be barely OK. X300 OK not great.

bluemagic98

Hi
Im pretty sure it will run it but you should understand that that Vid card isnt a High end gamming card. Granted its a PCI express card but its on the budget end of vid cards. If it has 128 meg of ram on the card then you should be OK. That card came in a few sizes 64meg being the smallest It has 4 pixle pipes where as the pci express slot can run 16 like the X-800 card. I look at a lot of componants and i try to look at the fill rate ive seen cards look very much alike but the pixle fill rate is always a tell tail sign that your card is up to speed your card is listed at a fill rate of 1300 I run a ATI 9800 xt its listed at 3300 the full blown ATI is over 8000 and the NVIDIA product is over 6000
In the real world you can enjoy flying at anything over 60 frames a sec over 150 is better start adding shadows and smoke and reflections the # drops In my case depending on the plane im flying i get between 300 and 400+ frames a sec if i stand in a cloud of smoke hovering till you cant see the plane or heli and I still drop under 100 Personaly I think the sim has isssues with smoke up close as it dosnt seem to have any real effect on frame rates at a distance. but you have to realize filling your screen with moving smoke is taxing the card.
Ive built a few systems and for what its worth I think you should allways spend your money buying the latest chip set over buying a card with more ram. the latest cards that are being built are almost allways going to be 256 meg out of all the cards that where sold with eather or 128 meg or 256meg. The 128 meg cards will run almost as fast as the 256 cards in the same chipset in most cases the 256 meg cards will only push the frame rate by a small fraction when the extra $150-$200 you spent on the extra 128 meg would have doubled your frame rate had you spent it on the next chipset. case in point my 9800 at 256 meg would have been over $400 I spent about 1/2 that. for $400 you can go more than 2 times as fast with a X800.

sorry to be so long winded but I think it was worth sharring this and a couple a links for referances.

http://www.a1-electronics.net/Graphi...ec04_pg3.shtml

http://www.pricewatch.com/m/mn.aspx?i=37&f=1

Ian.W

Blue magic, thanks for that. bit complex but i got the jist. The card came with my computer, and so a few computer friends say its much better than the normally supplied intel extreme thing. hes done a bit of reaserch on it to, aparently, although it is a "slow" card, theres another bit (sorry to be so vauge) which is fast (new cars have them, old dont). If i had the choise, id have gone with a better card, but im 15 so i cant afford a 400$ card. my friends upgrading soon (6ghz 64bit processer!!!!) i may buy his radeon 9600.

im going to borrow a mates copy of the sim, if it works, ill have to buy it

Ian

Ian.W

i just tried my colour on 16-bit. FPS on photoreal up to 260 and on normal to about 200 constant

STLPilot

My Feedback: (21)

If your running 150-200 on AFP, you'll be about 100-150 on AFPD.

bluemagic98

Someone may correct me on this but. Ill give you some advice the 9600 is a AGP card i dont think they ever made a 9000 series card in PCI Express your x300 I beleive is pci express only and as far as i know they dont make pci express motherboards with AGP 8x slots in them kinda defeats the purpose of PCI Express

on a lighter note the x700 cards start at around $150 on newegg.com and that will give you a huge leap over what you have now and the 9600 if it worked is very simmilar to 128 meg x-300 in my most humble oppinion.

Ian.W

Woah! took a few times to read, but i think i got it. lol. i found that i could tweak the settings of the card to give me either better performance or better quality. with it all the way over to performance its a ripe 200-300. get it on form an i got it to 360[X(][X(][X(] hehehe. as i said, im going to have a trial on my PC with a mates copy. so i shall see how it goes. thanks for all your help again
Ian