[hotani]

ok, well not exactly nothing, but certainly not enough to justify the upgrade.

I'm running an MDD dual 867MHz machine with 768MB of RAM

Here are some benchmarks from UT 2003 flyby-asbestos, 1024x768. Only thing that changed between tests was the graphics card:

it goes minimum fps/average/maximum:
With GeForce MX 32MB vram:
dm-asbestos
11.695272 / 56.900898 / 183.445816 fps
Score = 55.446545

dm-asbestos
12.931275 / 56.457146 / 165.873184 fps
Score = 55.073364

With GeForce Ti, 128MB vram:
dm-asbestos
11.737242 / 62.631523 / 249.150146 fps
Score = 57.810169

dm-asbestos
11.254939 / 60.859367 / 263.436371 fps
Score = 56.200726

ok, so the maximum improved, but the minimum fps is the SAME if not WORSE!!!

also, the upgrade jacked up my display settings that were in a very delicate equilibrium before. its a PC LCD display and did originally take me forever to get it looking normal, guess I'm starting over.

EDIT: see post below. apparently my machine had to 'warm up' to the upgrade...

[hotani]

and I'm a big idiot. I had fah running (distributed computing program that is not SUPPOSED to interfere with performance), and when I turned it off, my minimum fps jumped to a whopping 35! hehe - yeah, not too hot, but its good enough.

and yes I did turn off fah when I did the previous tests with the old card, but it didn't make much difference.

Also, little finder actions are slightly improved - the genie effect seems faster. I'm still not very impressed with the upgrade.

[Lateralus]

Glad you worked it out.

Yes, never run a distributed client when you are running something processor intensive. As much as the developers of distributed clients like to claim that they are submissive when it comes to processor use... it is not exactly true. At least, not completely.

I'll be upgrading my video card this summer, hopefully. I'm shooting for a Radeon 9800 Pro. But I need to upgrade my processor first.

[hotani]

something else weird about the upgrade. I had been messing with the machine for a while, and everything seemed choppy. Moving windows in the finder, gameplay, etc. I let it sit for about an hour then went back and everything was silky smooth! WTF? Not sure what is going on there, but I'm glad it started working better.

Oh yeah, final score on UT2003 benchmark test (same settings as above):
36.081886 / 79.010475 / 272.092957 fps
Score = 68.277473

[Turias]

Originally posted by hotani:
something else weird about the upgrade. I had been messing with the machine for a while, and everything seemed choppy. Moving windows in the finder, gameplay, etc. I let it sit for about an hour then went back and everything was silky smooth! WTF? Not sure what is going on there, but I'm glad it started working better.

Just a guess, but it might have been running some system script in the background at the time.

[littlegreenspud]

You might find that you can bump up the resolution and texture settings etc and not have a performance hit compared to your old card. UT2003 is quite processor intensive.