Good hardware, low framerates?

Question

im pretty sure my framerates in games arent as good as they should be. i have an amd athlon 64 x2 g400+, 4 gigs of pc6400 ram, a 4870, 700W PSU. running on vista home premium 64 bit. in crysis at max settings im getting 5 fps. in unreal tournament 3, ive been getting 30-60 fps, but ive read that people should be getting 120 fps! any ideas. my max resolution is 1440X900.

Answer 1

well chances are its not you hardware which is a fine gaming rig and should run those games no probs. You either need to work out whats happendning with the software, drivers, or hard disk and remedy it, or, if you dont know how to do that, reinstal your os and start from scratch. If on a new install its not running right, you can assume you have a hardware fault.

If all games are running poorly (crysis definitely is, I cant speak for ut3m and bear in mind you are using pci-e 1.0 not pcie 2.0 so this may explain some of the discrepancy)  then you can assume its something external to the games. If its just one game, something as simple as looking at the settings you are playing on and in rworst case reinstalling and resetting to defaults may fix the problem.

Anyhoo, its the usual stuff to look at like ensuring you have plenty of free disk space, killing off your services and startups, defrag, chkdsk, making sure you are running latest drivers (if you have tweaked anything in your video card settings through catalyst that may be whats causing the issue), and all that sort of gumph.

Good luck.