Geforce or ATI Radeon? Now, ive been given two graphics to choose from.. i know i can make researches on this matter thru the internet but i rather read opinions from you SIM fans on which one i should purchase.. 256MB geforce fx5200 or 128MB ATI Radeon 9600SE AGP8X
The FX5200 is probably better than the Radeon 9600SE. It's too bad that you have to choose between those two, as the SE version of the Radeon 9600 is more poor than the Radeon 9200, and the Radeon 9600 (no SE) is a good card. The SE or LE versions of cards are always lacking in features compared to their unlettered versions (with the top versions having things like Ultra and GT for the Geforces and XT and Pro for the Radeon versions.) Often they are lower in ability than the previous numbers (as in this case with the Radeon 9600SE vs the Radeon 9200.) The FX5200 is *roughly* equivalent of the Radeon 9200.
Just found this little gem, scroll down and hop right to the benchmarks. As you can see, both cards are right down at the bottom at every test. I definitely recommend getting a better card In fact, even a GeForce4 consistently performs better than those cards...
Sometimes they can't get a better card (because they don't have anything but PCI slots). And the Geforce 4s which do outperform them are not always available. That's why I recommend the ones I do.
I have a geforce fx5200 installed and a friend has the radeon 9600SE and I have to say that my friends computer runs The Sims 2 better than mine does. Althogh he also has more ram than I do. I have 256mb he has 768mb. Difficult choice you are faced with. personally I would probably go for the 9600SE.
Yeah, Thats what I think too but the neighbourhood screen on mine runs pretty jerky with reflections turned on but fine when theyre off. His runs fine with them on. Although all other modes work fine with reflections on , on mine. In getting another 512mb RAM in the next few weeks so I hope that solves the stuttering when new animantions load in and also cut down the IMMENSE loading times. Loading up a house of 3 takes about 6-8 minutes for me! My guess is that its using a lot of the pagefile as memory and is MUCH slower for it. Anyone else with low ram(256mb) get long long load times?
i also have 256mb DDR with a GeForce mx4000 and the load time is a lil slow but i wouldnt say its more than 3 minutes tops and the game runs fairly smooth with the occasional jerking if alot of stuff happens at one time. a buddy of mine is giving me his old GeForce 4 which has a lil more memory than my mx4000 so ill see if that changes anything! but i still got like 80% left on my hard drive memory so i dont see why that might be a problem?
I have 512Mb RAM and my load times are up to about 30 seconds for a REALLY LARGE lot... As always I would query how much of that 256Mb RAM is actually used in the background ( system tray, antivirus etc ), as I run my system really clean ( about 2% used in background ) where as I've seen people with so much **** in the background that they are at about 65% RAM usage even when just sitting in windows and staring at the desktop... ANYWAY... On the question at hand, I have a Radeon 8600 and the game runs fine at 1152x968. My system is far lower than anyone elses here ( well exc RAM it seems ) and it runs nicely. I had reflection issues with my 8600 when I first started the game, but the latest video drivers fixed that. I'd say ATI in every instance, but that's only because I'm happy with what I've got.
your right about the crap running in the background. there is another post somewhere in here that a guy runs through a bunch of steps for cleaning up your comp and disabling alot of stuff that dont need to be running to make gameplay better. i had already done some of the stuff he talks about but there was quite a few things i never knew that really boosted my performance but its relly onjly for windows XP users but if thats what you have its deffinatly worth checking out, ill see if i can find it again and post if anyone might be interested?
2% sounds more like CPU-usage to me, because you'd need something like 5 gigs of RAM for Windows + required background processes to only take up 2%. Anyway, TS2 auto-detects your video card and configures some settings behind the scenes, without notifying the user. For example, it automatically cranks Anistropic Filtering to 8x on my computer (which chows a lot of graphics power). This auto-configuration might be why your system can still run it nicely compared to other faster systems. (In several Source benchmarks, the Geforce 4 completely dominated the Radeon X800 and Geforce 6800U in framerate, because many features had to be disabled on it, being a DX7 card.) Btw, 1152 x 968 is one strange resolution. A 25:21 aspect ratio? I don't use a standard 4:3 myself (1280 x 1024, 5:4) but I've never seen anything like that before...
