terrible lag

Helly everyone! Ok so I just have a quick question. Im running my pc currently with an amd athlon 64 3500+ with 1 gig ram and a x1950 pro 512mb video card. The graphics are great... and i usually get 20 - 60fps when i play oblivion with almost all high settings. However when there's a lot to render... it lags soo bad! Why? Needs more ram? or needs a faster processor? I was looking at the amd athlon 64 x2 4200+ it only runs at 2.2ghz, like my 3500+ but i need it to render a lot of stuff will it help? I need some advice please if someone could help please. Thank you.

 

What video card you got?

 

amd radeon x1950 pro 512mbs gddr3

 

sorry ati not amd... always get them mixed up

 

Well you maybe experincing a bottleneck between the CPU>>>>>to FSB>>>>to RAM and then to Vid Card. That is quite a nice Vid Card but you haven't said whether you have DDR2 RAM (it is assumed that you do) etc etc nor what speed it is eg. DDR2 600...etc.

Okay Oblivion is a very demanding game and with only 1Gb of RAM and a CPU that maybe struggling I would lower some of your in game Video settings to medium (should still be great eye-candy) so the game runs smoother.

Now Oblivion is an off-line game so that means you can do some things to improve it's performance and free up system memory for the game;

- Stop any and all other PC activity...e.g. listening to music....DL from the net etc etc
- DC for the net.....just unplug your PCs' internet connection while playing, this will ensure you are not getting MS updates or any other net activity using your system resources.
- If off the net you can switch off some processes, e.g Security you can quit your AV and other security software....ENSURING you switch them back on before connecting and going back on the net.

IMHO you do have to little RAM (2Gb is about average nowadays) and your CPU maybe struggling to play a demanding game like Oblivion.

 

well...what's funny is that im just using a 184 pin ddr memory not ddr2 and i believe it's running at 366mhz. Which I believe could have a lot to do with it. Also i noticed that my ccc program (catalyst controller) for my ati radeon card lowers the fps drastically. So appearantly ram has a bit to do with this.

 

But the thing is... I've also ran the 3d benchmark and it tested my processor, and i got like 1 fps at best... And from adranalyn he told me that running an amd athlon 64 x2 4200 wouldn't really help for gaming, except multi tasking. So i just need to know if i should spend the money to get a better processor or just more ram... or both.