Need Advice!!!

hi everyone,this is my first post so apologies as not sure if its in the appropriate category!

Bascially, i finished building my first PC a couple of months ago, heres the spec:

asus striker extreme
intel q6600
western digital raptor 150gb
4gb OCZ 8500 Sli mem
8800 GTX XXX
750W EZcool power supply
vista 32

so heres the problem,

as you can see,its a pretty good spec machine,should be fast and great graphics right?wrong! can play any game,for example: half life series,Bioshock,TRA,lost planet ect, but can seem to get the graphics spot on,with bioshock/lost planet,no matter how much i adjust the settings,download patches etc,i cant get rid of jaggies!and the loading time into windows is pretty slow too.

any help would be greatly appreciated!
cheers guys,


P.S - have tried taking memory out,leaving just 2 gig/taking out all startup programs and removing older drivers

 

To get rid of the jaggies turn on anti aliasing (or AA) in the games you get the jaggies, Also how much memory does your video card have?

 

thanks for reply.i have turned on AA via the nvidia control panel and the game,and the card has 768Mb

 

What drivers are you using for the video card? The newest drivers have fixes for "graphic glitches" in the games you mentioned.

 

im using the latest ones for the video card and for everything else!i would call them glitches as such as im not getting any anomalies just not great graphics and a generally slow machine,well slow on startup.i think the main problem just seems to be AA on the higher spec games.

 

It's not much help for you, but Vista is going to have problems with various games for a while. Most every gamer I know went back to XP because it simply works with all their games. Otherwise you will have to follow the specific game's forums and see if there is a tweak you can do. Vista can cause the game to run slow, have glitches, or even not work at all. Companies are still scrambling to put out approved drivers.

 

youre right its not lol but appreciate the advice,i did switch back to XP but then i was drawn into the wonderful world of directx 10,and with crysis out tomorrow (uk) i couldnt resist lol!oh well will have to wait and see then,thanks again!

 

I agree about Directx10 and it's making me seriously look at Vista again but so far I'm hearing bad things about the specific games I play. Hang in there!

 

Direct X10? I'll put this to you, look up Halo 2 on XP. You'll be quite surprised.

 

I have seen it,and admittedly its pretty good,BUT have you seen crysis (dx10) playing on a HD screen?now that is suprising

 

Bah, DX10 on Crysis isn't that spectacular. I removed Vista and am currently using it as a coaster. Besides, I can have DX10 gfx on Crysis without using DX10. Just google it and youll find out how to do it as well.

The game play on Vista was quite lame, things crashed (especially PunkBuster), others wouldn't load at all, I'm awaiting a SP for Vista or something.

But as for the jaggies, I get the same thing on XP. I'm using the 8800GTS640MB and i play all my games on Highest settings. The problem I see is that their is no vertical sync on any of these new games. Like for example, BioShock, I have the highest settings on getting 40+FPS but yet I still have shearing. I remember in older games when on Highest settings, you had to enable Vertical Sync to fix that problem. Don't even see that option on Crysis.

 

i havent really had a problem with the games crashing,the system itself before i get into the games on the other hand is a nightmare!! and youre right there is no vertical sync option in the graphical setting in the game,but you can turn it to " force v-sync" through the Nvidia control panel,just make sure you do the same for the inbuilt crysis settings you get with the new driver,but that still hasnt made a difference to me,i think somewhere im getting some kind of bottle-neck,be it hardware or software im not yet sure! still havent found anyone that can help!!

 

Vista is rock solid stable for me. I run it on my main pc and XP on my other computers. Vista is just as stable and crash free as XP.

When Vista first released it was bad; then again so was XP when it first released. Now though and with many fixes from Microsoft; Vista is doing well and runs awesome!

Oh and Crysis is by far a way better looking game than Halo 2 or any other game out on the market now. Of course this is just my opinion.

 

Only an Operating System could have a six-month usability turn around. Any other piece of software that acted like that would be dropped faster than an FPS gamer on a dial-up connection.

 

Turning it on from the control panel isn't enough, also turn it on within the game.

As for your slow load times, that may be a sound issue. You didn't list a sound card, do you have one? Onboard sound cards can really chug with some games.

I know I had that problem with Crysis, decreasing the sound to "low" significantly increased my load times, and made me think it was a time to buy a sound card.

 

its been a while since ive looked but i dont think there is an in game v-sync option you can turn on? and ive got an x-fi extreme gamer so sound isnt a problem!and like i said its all games not just crysis,and its really bugging me as,in total i spent around £1500 on my rig and its not performing!

 

Crysis doesn't. But many games do. And virtually all games have AA toggles.

Also, in higher resolution aliasing will be less noticeable. So you might try setting your games to max resolution for your monitor. Your set-up should be able to handle it.

Playing around with those settings should eliminate or greatly decrease your problem with "jaggies."

Load times is another matter. They aren't as dependent on your system. Many games just have longish load times. But there are often fixes.

Here's a thread about long load times in BIOSHOCK (one of the games you mentioned), you might find some help here:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5943&page=11