Performance Problems with PCI Graphics Card

[spht]

I'm pretty sure my PCI bus is my bottleneck, but I figured I'd ask here.

I have a FX 5200 (the fastest pci card I could find.. I tried the MX440 and the radeon 9200 and this one came up on top) and I'm just having trouble getting Blast Corps (my favorite game) to run without gagging.

It runs fine for the most part but anytime there are a bunch of explosions it stutters down to 30fps and makes me sad. I've tried reinstalling DirectX and the drivers several times. Is there an older version of drivers that runs faster than the latest drivers?

I've tried Jabo's plugins, Rice's, and Glide64. All of them seem to have fairly similar framerates and they all stutter and are jerky when action gets high. I've also tried UltraHLE, and 1964. They all have about the same framerates.

On a side note, Mario 64 runs at about 140fps unthrottled at the intro screen.

If anyone has been in this situaton and has figured out a solution, I'd be very happy. Even if the solution is "get a new mobo with an AGP slot".

Computer Specs:
Insight P4-ITX Motherboard (P4N266A northbridge + VT8235 Southbridge)
2.4Ghz Celery (OC'd to 2.75 Ghz)
512MB DDR2700
PNY Geforece FX 5200 128MB

Help.. please... I'm craving the game...

 

[Clements]

I think Blast Corps has problems and appears to run too fast, could be a core issue rather than a plugin issue. Not much you can do really. There is nothing wrong with your computer and it meets all the requirements of PJ64 (graphics card doesn't matter much as long as it's a fairly recent ATi/GeForce, it's the CPU that matters for speed and yours is fast enough)

 

[ackmondual]

Blast Corps seems normal enough to me at its present speed. The only problem i had with the game were its save states, which did become corrupt.

 

[Flash]

I'm pretty sure my PCI bus is my bottleneck, but I figured I'd ask here.

Yep, there's really huge fps difference between PCI and AGP 8x - about 5 fps

FX5200 itself not too fast (Radeon 9200 (not SE) is waay faster) but both of them is quite enough for N64 emulation.
But Blast Corps is choppy game, it runs better with 1964 0.99 but can hang.
It's sad but i lost my 1964 ini with perfect settings for this game... no hangups and smooth...

 

[spht]

Does the ROM revision make a difference?

I have version 1.0 of the Blast Corps rom.. Does 1.1 work any better?

 

[revl8er]

LikeClements said, Blast Corps currently doesn't work right.