Optimize For Better Gaming Or maybe a different OS

[Zagubadu? 0]

Is there any way to set up a computer so that it runs games faster. I don't know if you guys know what Can You Run It is so if you don't I'll explain. CYRI is a online program you use to see if you can run computer games on your current system specs. It will say something like required ram 2GB PASS. Same thing with video card specs and CPU. I got a perfect score on Border Lands. So this should mean that I can run the games with the setting maxed out, right? No. I have tried with max settings and it lags like crazy. I can run this game with some setting low and some medium. I am using Windows 7. So is the problem that my video cards resources are being taken up by Windows 7? Is the system scan incorrect? It also says that I have a perfect score for MW2 I highly doubt thats possible. So is there any way to optimize my system with certain settings or anything? My system is already cleaned once a week. ( Registry errors, Defrag, and other stuff ) Does anyone know whats up?

Edited January 27, 2010 by Zagubadu? (see edit history)

[truefusion 3]

Windows generally and inherently makes itself slow in due time (even with all the tuning and defragging done). In your RAM topic you say you have 2 gigs of RAM. You also say you have a 64-bit system. So, it should be safe to assume you are running Windows 7 64-bit, probably home premium. By the system requirements of Windows 7 64-bit, 2 gigs of RAM is the minimum requirement (last i checked at least). In order to run games fast you'll need the following: a decent multi-core processor, a lot of RAM (i.e. more than what the minimum requirements for the operating system is) with good speed and timings (at least dual-channeled RAM), but most importantly a good graphics card. The test you used probably judges based on minimum requirements.

When you are low on RAM, the system starts using your HDD as temporary RAM. When this happens your computer will decrease in performance dramatically. Running games on high settings not only requires more RAM and processing power but a graphics card that can handle the load. I can run MW2 on its maximum settings without any lag. Here are my system specs:

RAM: 4 gigs (dual-channel) @ 1333mhz 6-7-7-24 (i could get better timings, but then MW2 starts to crash after a while of playing)Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 @ 3.2ghzGraphics card: 750mhz, 1 GB, 320 stream processors

I don't have Windows 7, i have Windows XP, so the operating system isn't taking up much of my RAM. For better performance, a new system would be best.

[mra550 0]

keep your computer fresh everyday and be sure to check game requirements and don't follow it, I mean do more so that you can experience more, fast and reliable gaming, a gaming computer must have a high ram, processor and a display card and updated driver, windows will make itself slow but you can get rid of this by keeping it fresh. regularly disk cleanup and run anti-virus daily to check if there are some virus also get a temp cleaner so that it cleans all the temporary files that you don'tneed anymore.

[elevenmil 0]

I bought my computer less than 2 years ago and most of the games I want to play my computer doesn't have the specs for. I didn't intentially buy a computer just for gaming (I wasn't a gamer back then), but I figured $1,000 computer should have been quality enough to play newly released games only a one year of age. Man was I wrong. I play America's Army, and their new version that was recently released is too much for my computer to handle!...and my computer isn't even 2 years old yet! Now I'm stuck playing the older outdated version until I can get a new computer. The above post is descent enough, but if your specs clearly don't meet the minimum requirements for whatever game you are trying to play, then I guess you might be out of luck. Then again, I'm no expert on the subject but I just thought I'd share some of my beefs.

[bluedragon 0]

Only RAM is not responsible for the Game getting slowed. You haven't specified the full configuration of your system. Anyways. Your graphics card is the main thing responsible for rendering of the game. So even if you put more RAM and your card isn't too good , You won't be able to run the game with max settings. If you want to play games with everything set to max , I'll suggest you buy a high end graphics card ( and a good power supply as per requirement ).

[Zagubadu? 0]

I have 2GB ram, Intel Celeron 3.33 GHz, and a My video card . I'm not 100% sure what SLI means. Anyone that knows is it so that I could get another of the same video card and use it with it?

[rayzoredge 2]

Yikes... I don't know about you, but from what I'm reading, "Celeron" is synonymous with "suck" in the CPU world. Take that 3.3GHz figure and knock it back to something like 2.6GHz and you'll have more of an idea as to its "effective" clock speed. The world has been changing, and a few years ago, I thought 2GB was all you needed for just about everything short of crazy AutoCAD renders, working with Abobe software, or any other RAM-intensive application. Nowadays, I occasionally bring my laptop with 4GB of RAM to its knees while trying to work with a sizable image file in Photoshop... which makes sense. Upgrade to 4GB of RAM. Then sit on that until I start saying that you'll need 8GB. (You shouldn't really ever need more than 8GB of RAM, though... I swear. And gaming doesn't make much of a difference between a machine equipped with 4GB of RAM compared to one equipped with 8GB... we're talking about single digits for frames-per-second here.)Bluedragon is right on your limitations for most games that are GPU-intensive. 3D games and especially fast first-person shooters can really take a toll on your graphics card, and it's depressing to know that an upgrade isn't exactly cheap. Your card, by initial glance, sounds pretty good relative to your set up, but if you're complaining about slow speeds during gaming, you might just want to look into upgrading to a whole new system. You can snag a pre-built system with a quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and a decent hard drive for sub-$600 prices nowadays, so I'd look into that and throw a good graphics card into it to get the best bang for your buck as easily as possible.But I'm sure that's not what you wanted to hear, because like 95% of the people here on Xisto (including me), you too have a budget. It's easy for anyone to recommend the obvious: upgrade your hardware, defragment your hard drive, clean this, do that. However, sometimes we just have to do what we can and suck it up. This is what I have to say as far as not having to spend a dime:Defragmentation only improves your performance by a marginal amount. What it does is basically "organize" clusters of data with each other so that your hard drive doesn't have to seek the entire platter to put together some pieces to load something... it can just get all the data from one place on the platter and save you those microseconds. Yeah... not a huge difference, unless your hard drive is really, really badly fragmented. (I believe that NTFS helps with that though.)Cleaning out your registry with third-party tools can be good for your start-up time (since there's less entries for Windows to consider), but I don't know how much of a performance boost it would grant. To me, I don't think having a clean registry will help your overall performance after boot, but I could be wrong.Overclocking your CPU using software could be slightly beneficial, but if your GPU is holding things up, it won't help you that much in that case. Overclocking the GPU would help to an extent, but that's the longevity of your hardware that you're trading there.Making sure you have enough hard drive space for your page file will keep your computer from crashing. The page file usage only occurs when your system runs out of RAM to use at any given point in time, and using your hard drive space as RAM is quite possibly the slowest way to go... which is why everyone says to get more RAM. You won't need more than 4GB unless you run a lot of applications at once and multi-task.Limit your start-up programs to items you really need. Personally, I tell anti-virus auto-protection to take a hike, but leave the firewall up. (I use my AV program to scan manually when I know there may be a possible risk to running risky executables.) Anti-malware programs can take up quite a bit of CPU and RAM sometimes, especially if you allow background tasks.If you want, you can fine-tune your services that start up with Windows, although this will free up just a marginal amount of resources... so it's your call (again) to risk disabling a service that you may need. (Fortunately, you can just turn it back on if you accidentally disable your Internet or your ability to communicate with other computers on your network, etc.)Not sure what else you can do there... like I recommend, I'd upgrade to a whole new machine if and when you can.EDIT: I notice that the "edit" function comes and goes... this is the second time I've seen it.Anyway, SLI (Scalable Link Interface) is nVIDIA's technology that allows for you to use two like graphics cards in tandem to give you more GPU power, although it is hardly doubling your performance. At best, it can give you up to a 60% boost... which can make sense economically if you can just snag up another 9400GT for $60 if your graphics card is indeed the bottleneck in your set up for gaming, but you aren't exactly getting the best bang for your buck. Situation-dependent, really...

Edited January 28, 2010 by rayzoredge (see edit history)

[rvalkass 5]

Is there any way to set up a computer so that it runs games faster.

There are two things you can do to speed up your computer in general, not just for games: close running processes, or throw hardware at it. Stop every background task you can (Windows applications have a tendency of spawning background processes for no good reason) and close all running programs before starting your game. If you use the Task Manager to look at your CPU and memory usage you should be able to see if you've got anything running taking up a lot of your computer's power. If games are still running too slow after that then you need to throw more hardware at the problem. The graphics card is the main bottleneck when it comes to gaming, so look at getting a new graphics card if you want to run games faster. The CPU and RAM are probably equal second in importance, so look at upgrading those too if you can't upgrade your graphics card.

 

I don't know if you guys know what Can You Run It is so if you don't I'll explain. CYRI is a online program you use to see if you can run computer games on your current system specs. It will say something like required ram 2GB PASS. Same thing with video card specs and CPU. I got a perfect score on Border Lands. So this should mean that I can run the games with the setting maxed out, right?

No. These services generally use the minimum and recommended specifications for each game. The minimum generally describes the hardware required to get the game to appear on the screen at the lowest detail settings and with all effects turned off. It is arguable if the game would be playable with these minimum specifications - generally a framerate of at least 25fps is needed for smooth playback. The recommended specifications are usually nearer the mark for running the game smoothly at low settings, or maybe enabling the odd medium setting or two. If you want to run games at high detail settings with all the special effects then you need to get much better hardware than the recommended specifications.

 

I have 2GB ram, Intel Celeron 3.33 GHz, and a My video card . I'm not 100% sure what SLI means. Anyone that knows is it so that I could get another of the same video card and use it with it?

The Celeron CPUs are all single-core CPUs. Most games now are written to take advantage of at least two CPU cores, so getting a good dual-core CPU would be a step in the right direction. Of course, that would need you to look at a new motherboard, new RAM, etc. Your graphics card is from nVidia's budget range, so cannot be expected to play any games at high detail settings, and may struggle with too many at medium as well. You will likely need to keep at least a few settings at low to get an acceptable framerate.

 

SLI depends on your graphics cards and your motherboard supporting the technology. It also works better for some games than others. You'd also want to check your PSU can provide the power required for two graphics cards.