Tweaking My Video Card Graphics Performance

kanghsun

Greetings,

For some reason, I find my computer lagging in graphics performance when I play games.  I currently have a Radeon X800 XT 256 video card and two 512 DDR2 memory cards.  I spend so much money every 6 months buying the best video card and upgrading my computer; which really hurts my pockets. 

I love PC base games and I buy the latest games on the market.  The problem is that when I play new game titles such as FEAR, Dark and Light, and Call of Duty 2 my video game performance lags.  Why is that?  Is there some way I can tweak my computer?  Maybe its not my video card or memory and maybe its the way I set up my computer.  Being a computer illiterate, can someone help me out? 

Thanks.

Scorpes

I dont know your exact configuration so im not sure if this applies to you or not so forgive me if im preaching to the choir.

What many people do is when they buy computer parts is they only look at the stats and buy it purely based on that. An x800 is a good ATI chip so people go out and buy an x800, but different x800's by different companies are not equal. One will usually stand out better than another due to various manufacturers differences.
Well that goes for almost every single part of a computer, buying a supported board is very different from buying a performance motherboard. If you buy cheap components computers will be much slower than a computer built with top of the line components.

Between x800's their could be 10fps difference, between cheap motherboards and performance motherboards also can be a very large performance increase, same goes with ram and other components.
Two computers could be build around the same specs, one built with cheapest components another built with performance. You will get more bang for your buck with performance parts as it can delay upgrading for a longer period of time and also increase your gaming experience during that period.

That is basically what Alienware does, anyone could make a machine as fast or faster than an alienware for far cheaper, they just charge you premium because they did all the research and know which components are the fastest and put it together.

Now to answer you specifically, Im assuming you allready are doing the "run in lower reslution, Turn AA, AF off, lower graphics quality route.
You will want to run the most up to date drivers on everything, as a more drastic measure you might also want to upgrade the bios on your parts as sometimes performance increases are put into bios, BUT only do it if you see some documentation somewhere that a bios update makes a difference. Otherwise if everything is working for you dont update your bios for no performance gain. Defraging a hard drive can have some difference as well.
Also look into the actual bios settings at startup and see if you cant tweak your memory settings, and that leads to possibly overclocking. Overclocking can be a bit dangerous and shouldnt be attempted without researching it thoroughly. If the machine is at the end of its performance lifeline a good overclock might extend it quite a bit.