OK guys, i need your help on G400 and Counter Strike...

[MasterGoa]

Here is the deal.

My freind has a K6-2 550 with a G400 16MB.
In Q3 800x600 with 16 Bit and everything low,
he pulls 28-40FPS.

In CS, with everything rock bottom and 640x480,
he pulls 6-8 FPS... OUCH!!!

What gives? He has CS retail 1.0.0.2.
He has 5.10 i beleive but not shure...

Any CS players here and if so, any tweaks
or anything!

Thanx all!

[EvilDonnyboy]

Too slow CPU. Simple as that. Although CS doesn't require all that much CPU power, the G400 needs a lot of CPU cycles (compared to the TNT2 and Voodoo3, comparable cards) to run at peak efficiency (it hits it's limit at around a 900mhz P3). It becomes sustantially slower as the cpu gets slower.

To solve this you could either get a voodoo3 which is nicer on slower CPU's or get more pure FPU power (a P3 or Athlon) to back up the G400. I don't believe overclocking the video card will do too much at low-res in CS. Overclocking the CPU will do good stuffs, but the K6's never were eager overclockers.



edit: wait a second, i didn't read the post fully. 6-8FPS is obviously not right even for that slow rig. Try using Matrox's driver uninstal utility to uninstall any traces of previous matrox drivers. Than install any of the newer drivers again. A whole format and OS install wouldn't hurt either.

[MasterGoa]

Thanx!

Ill try it right away...

Do you have any preference on driver?

Thanx again!

[ayoub_ibrahim]

what OS is he using?

[RichL]

I used to run a G400Max on a AMD K6III/475 system using Win98SE, so I feel your pain!
Playing TFC in 800x600 16bit colour (I could never keep up to date with the latest cheats for CS) I could get 35fps on a good day. Downhill. With a tail wind.
Under maximum spammage conditions (ie attacking through the tunnel on map2 of Dustbowl) I'd regularly drop to 10-12fps.

Upgrading to a Duron 960 has at least doubled my FPS!

[Wombat]

My MultiPlayer halflife scores were around 20fps with my K6-2/350@400, and a G400MAX.

Are you sure that this card has busmastering on?
id has been better at including 3DNow! code in later engines (Half-Life is still based on Quake I, but tons of additons), but I didn't think it could be That much of a difference.

What kind of filtering and mipmapping?

32-bit zbuffer, or 16?

[MasterGoa]

Here goes...

Fic 2013D with 128MB Ram
Win98SE
Aureal Vortex
G400 16MB

He is in 640x480 16Bit. I assume the color depth
is same as desktop. Is this the case?

I went on a 10 player map and he has a very good
cable modem connection using USB and downloads
around 150-200K/sec on most sites.

I dont know about filtering or mipmapping. How do i find
out?

If he would get 20-30FPS that would be grat, but unfortunately
he get 8 FOS and goes down to 2 when fragged...

Help!!!

Does anyome know the config.cfg entries to reduce detail and
such?

Thanx!

[RichL]

With a low Horsepower CPU, some of the easier things to do to improve performace are to run in 16-bit colour (from the desktop) and turn off High Quality sounds, 3d and EAX sound support, and enable low quality models.
Oh, and turn the multiplayer decals down to 0 - this also controls the number of blastmarks & bullet holes in the game.

Theres a setting in Config.CFG called something like "Cl_Giblevel=25" that defines how many bits an exploded (or sniped) player flies into. Turning this down to 2 or 3 helps quite a bit.

One of the settings I found quite effective was "R_Dynamic 0" which is supposed to turn off dynmaic lighting, but it doesnt seem to work under the latest patch.

[MasterGoa]

Do you now where i could get other tweak parameters
for a config.cfg file? Also, i do i reduce player model detail?

Thanx!

[omegaRED]

Try <a href="http://www.planethalflife.com" target="_blank">Planet Half-Life ...

[Jewbroni]

Hi guys. New person here, but my problem seems directly related (and possibly dead on) to the problem that has been listed.

Up until today, I had a V3 3000 which ran great in Counter-Strike (up to 50-60fps on 1024x768) and had no visual anomalies. But the card has reached his age limit and started to overheat, producing choppy images and gradually made the game unplayable after extensive time used. Today, I burrowed my friend's extra G400 Dual-Head, and am now in a bigger world of hurt.

While a demo test of Half-Life, run on a LAN Multiplayer map with just me in the game, ran fairly well on Open-GL, C-strike runs like absolute crap with either GL or D3D. Not only will it go around 5 fps, but it hurts the system to where it won't pick up certain actions, like the fire button or jump button - simply b/c it has the appearance of "lagging out". Here is my setup:

Abit BE6-I Motherboard
Pentium III 700 w/ Golden Orb (not OC'd)
SB Live! Value
Western Digital 40GB HDD
128MB PC133 RAM
Cable Modem, maxes at 5000kbps (500-600KB/S)
-(all other info. not really important)

The system itself is quite capable of pushing enough juice into the card, as you can see.
One of the problems that has been brought to my attention is that lingering Voodoo3 drivers might be hanging around and screwing with the system. If this is right, how in the hell can I completely get rid of them outside of what uninstalling the card's software did? And another thing - I find the gamma in CS to be extremely low, around 1.0. With the V3, I could lock the Desktop gamma to 1.0, and have my Glide/D3D gamma at another level completely like 1.3, but I can't seem to find an option like this with the G400. Also, the "brightness" or "gamma" console commands in CS don't seem to work with either D3D or OpenGL. This problem isn't nearly as big a deal as getting my friggin' 5FPS ordeal fixed!! Can somebody help me out?

Jewbroni~

[Wombat]

I think your problem might be a little different.

The Voodoo drivers leave a lot of crud around, even after you "uninstall" them. It will stop the Matrox drivers (and others) from working correctly.

Clean out your dlls, and your registry of all the 3dfx stuff.

Then a clean reinstall of the Matrox drivers.

[PeTe]

Just a question ?

Looking at the thread i saw someone playing CS/xx with 20-30fps.. Aaaaaargh.

Guessing you dont kill anyone with that kind of fps ? With fast-paced online-multiplayergames you REALLY should have atleast 50-60fps or more, so when the s*it hits the fan you still can move and shoot @ 25-30fps.

I understand that if your cant get any more fps then you just have to live with it ( or upgrade ), but why use high-resolution and 32bit colours if your setup cant handle it ? If i remember my settings right i use 800x600@32bit ( havent played CS in couple months so i might be wrong ) with my 1.33G TB+G400MAX. When you want to make some frags i would choose high fps over 32bit colours or bit higher resolution on CS anyday.

Hmm.. looking at the post i went of topic all the way.. but cant really undestand why even play with less fps.. i would play oldschool Q1-TF or DM if my hardware couldnt do decent fps in CS/TFC/UT

PeTe