First post, by athlon-power
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I know this is getting repetitive, but at the same time, I feel like I'm close to getting HL running smoother than it is right now.
I made a thread before about having performance issues with HL on this system:
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III Katmai 500MHz/512KB Cache/100MHz FSB
256MB PC133 RAM @100MHz
ASUS AGP-V3800M SDRAM, 32MB (nVidia Vanta TNT2 M64)
AOpen AW744L II Sound Card
48X Samsung IDE CD-ROM
WD400 Caviar 40GB IDE HDD
3.5" 1.44MB FDD
At the time, I had a Coppermine @600MHz in it, and I was seeing frame drops, low FPS, etc. Through that thread, it was determined that Half-Life is a very CPU-intensive game, and that even PIII Coppermines @800MHz ended up having issues with the game. However, when I think back on it, I used an nVidia GeForce FX5200 AGP card in it early on, because I had no time-accurate card that could really play anything all that well. Here's the catch: it ran fine, with the 500MHz Katmai (before I changed out the decaying thermal pad with thermal paste, and using a passive heatsink!). I'm starting to think that it's because the FX5200 was drawing a decent amount of rendering load from the CPU.
My question is now, is there a GPU released before/during mid-1999 that did something similar? I do own a GeForce 2 MX400 AGP card, and I'd test it with that, but the whole reason as to why I was using the FX5200 early on in the first place is because the GeForce 2 didn't work very well with the i440BX Chipset on the Gateway Tabor III motherboard I was using at the time, and the motherboard I'm using either has a very similar chipset, or the same chipset. The GeForce 2 refused to render Half-Life, and would crash very, very often. I tried the Savage 2000 on that board, and it did the same thing, so I might have luck on this new board if I use older drivers. I think I'm going to change out the V3800M with the GeForce 2 and see what happens.
I will post an update as to what happens. If it works fine, and runs better, I'll know that the card should be drawing some of the load from the CPU.
I do want to know if any time-accurate (mid-1999 and before) GPUs were known to be able to take some load off of the CPU, and give the system a leg up in rendering capability. If the GeForce 2 works, in the meantime, I will use it, until I can get a more time-accurate card. I'll have to wait a while before I get enough money to buy anything like that, however, I am thinking that VooDoo 2's might be a viable solution. I theoretically wouldn't have to replace the ASUS card, and could just plug the VooDoo 2's into the system, I do have 3 free PCI slots. (the system has 4 PCI slots, two ISA slots- one is a combo ISA/PCI slot, only one of the two can be used at a time in it, and an AGP slot).
Where am I?