DeeBye,Sep 16 2003, 05:06 AM Wrote:Chipset : VIA Technologies Inc VT8375 ProSavageDDRAnswer to your question:
If you haven't spotted it by now, I am using my motherboard's onboard graphics (the S3 ProSavage), which I suspect is the source of the problem.
I also happen to have on older ATI Radeon 7000 32MB PCI card hanging out in my old computer. Would installing this be an upgrade over the onboard S3 ProSavageDDR?
1) Yes
2) Yes
Look up the ProSavageDDR chipset. It's 3d performance is UTTERLY HORRIBLE. I'm surprised it was even playable on your pc. Just about anything would be an update over that POS. Example:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/i845gp4...66sis650intvga/
The boards using your ProSavageDDR chipset are the two VIA boards (the KM266 and the P4M266). No ECS board is listed, but go and look at the "3d performace, game tests" graphs - starts about halfway down that page. Go a bit further and look at the Quake 3 performance.
Wait i'll reproduce the Quake 3 graph for you, because JK2 is a Q3 engine game:
QUAKE III DEMO FOUR (800x600x16) - all numbers are fps
i845G: 75
GF2 MX200: 100
GF2 MX400: 166
SiS 650: 66
VIA P4M266: 39 (this is your chipset)
nForce 420: 134 (this, incidentally, is my mobo)
VIA KM266: 37 (this is another instance of your chipset)
[By the way, if you turn the res up to 1024x768, the ProSavage chipset's fps drop below 20!!]
As you can see the ProSavageDDR chipset gets shat on by just about everyone. It's performance is particularly bad - you said yourself you get between 40 and 70 fps in JK2 with all the detail runed right down (and i'm guessing it approaches 70 in the simple areas of low polys).
Go look into the price of any cheap AGP 3d card. A GeForce 2 MX-anything or a GeForce4 MX-anything would be a *HUGE* improvement. Hell, an "old" GeForce 2 GTS, bought second hand, would rip apart what you have now. Shop around, compare prices of basic 3d cards, and get yourself a good deal - because you really don't need a hell of a lot of grunt to replace the godawful chipset you have now. Updating your drives aren't going to fix this - it's like beating a dead horse, there's nothing there and it doesn't matter how much you flog it it's not gonna get up and run. Buy a new horse (even a mule will do).
You have no problem with ram, IO or anything that I could see (but I didn't look really hard). Your "video card", dare I call it that, is what's causing the problem. My wife has a board with the same chipset on it, but since we pretty much only play Diablo 2, i'm living with the card - but even in Diablo 2 I can see the horrible performance. I had to disable perspective and turn the lighting down to low. Just awful.