Okay, I'm posting this on behalf of another member here, because he thinks that nobody can solve his problem. In my determination to help him fix this problem in order to get him to stop ranting about it every day, I'm going to take the initiative and see what I can do.

Here are the user's specs:

- Brand: HP Pavilion a6200n

- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750

- CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz

- 2GB RAM

- OS: Windows 10

Games like Morrowind and GTA IV are running like crap, and can barely get 20fps. So, I haven't been able to do much, but a few things are obvious already:

1. He needs a new PC, but he's only 17, and doesn't have a job, so...

2. Could use some more ram, but 2 of his slots are broken so he can only fit in one more.

3. HP doesn't make the best of gaming PCs in general.

He's got the latest drivers, and everything appears okay, but he still keeps getting piss poor speeds, when even a machine this old can handle those games. I'm out of ideas. Any of you have anything to suggest to him?

Shogun.

2GB RAM

.

Buy larger ram sticks - that not enough to run modern games with.

Methinks you missed the "Morrowind" part of it.

I mean, I can understand GTA IV running slow, since it's not optimized for sh*t, but Morrowind?

Come on, Morrowind shouldn't be having any problem.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you could be experiencing driver issues with Morrowind since Direct3D8 is rather old. I ran some old D3D8 code from one of my old programming books, and it ran at 20fps (WDDM 2.0 appears to break many old DirectX games in terms of speed). Keep in mind that NV and other major vendors aren't actively checking their drivers against really old versions of DirectX. If you want another example, I tried running Zulu Assault (a 2D game using DirectDraw5) on Win8 and even Win10. Result? 6fps tops ingame.

How many other games have you tried? How many other games do you own? Have you tried running some gfx coding samples, like, let's say, the NVIDIA SDK? It could be those specific games. I want to know what else you tried.

Shogun.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you could be experiencing driver issues with Morrowind since Direct3D8 is rather old. I ran some old D3D8 code from one of my old programming books, and it ran at 20fps (WDDM 2.0 appears to break many old DirectX games in terms of speed). Keep in mind that NV and other major vendors aren't actively checking their drivers against really old versions of DirectX. If you want another example, I tried running Zulu Assault (a 2D game using DirectDraw5) on Win8 and even Win10. Result? 6fps tops ingame.

How many other games have you tried? How many other games do you own? Have you tried running some gfx coding samples, like, let's say, the NVIDIA SDK? It could be those specific games. I want to know what else you tried.

Shogun.

Now that you mention it, Portal and Portal 2 run at 60FPS mostly, while completely maxed out. Even AA. But it still doesn't make sense.

San Andreas has issues if I turn on the stencil shadows.

GTA III and Vice City run fine.

I'm so confused.

Then I think it's a driver related issue. The drivers are probably breaking your game(s), except for the more demanding ones that require more RAM. Does San Andreas give you visible bugs and other garbage when stencil shadows are on?

Another story for you. When WinXP x64 came out, the drivers for my GeForce 6600 were pretty bad. Halo ran at 5fps even though I had a good PC, and other games I had were either too slow, or broken visually. Sometimes you can't blame the PC entirely. If you have a PC that can handle it, it's safe to assume you have driver issues.

As for Morrowind, try reading this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/1ag2o2/help_getting_horrible_fps_around_20ish_on_very/

Shogun.

San Andreas *looks* normal when I turn on the stencil shadows, it just runs like crap.

Morrowind runs at 5FPS when I try that suggestion, though.

I dunno, this whole thing confuses me.

Alright. *cracks fingers*

The Processor core is pretty outdated. and I recommend an update soon. The GPU will be outrunning the processor which means that the processor is a bottle neck. Because you are using an AMD rig you can upgrade to a new AMD processor. But unfortunately I have no idea what type your board supports. AM3 socket is backwards compatible with AM2 processor. But AM3 processor can not fit in an AM2 socket. So... unless you know what you can support. You're pretty much SOL in that department.

Morrowind is bound to run like crap right now. It's not designed to take advantage of current hardware. So try running it with "Open Morrowind"

I kinda expected GTA V to not run very well on that system. Battlefield on Ultra with that same graphics card and a stronger processor can only produce 24FPS on average.

With GTAV being more graphically involved... I'd imagine it'd be a pain to get that thing to run on minimum specifications.

You can upgrade the graphics card... but your CPU is still the problem.

And as for your RAM... an upgrade can go a long ways for you. Not sure how far though. But with AMD you always want to have a number of ram sticks installed that's divisible by two.

It's something to do with the way AMD optimizes it's RAM use for speed or something. So... 2 sticks. 4 sticks. ect.

A good minimum for the amount of ram you need is probably 6. But I'd shoot for 8. That's two 4gig sticks. Not one 8gig

Running an operating system that consumes considerable CPU doing things like live speech recognition and that per se needs 2GB to accomodate itself on a computer with an elderly CPU and 2GB of RAM...

it's surprising that it runs so well!

Being able to play a game like Morrowind (and even more so GTA) at all in these conditions is pretty awesome. Kudos to the developers of Morrowind and GTA.