New video card

[[AK]Abaddon]

Hi folks,

Well ... somehow I talked the household Minister of Finance into a Radeon 9700 Pro. Don't ask me how ... I am not sure myself.

I installed this thing tonight, and am having some issues with it - namely, it is slower than my GF3 in Raven Shield. My frame rates are hovering in the 30-40s at 1024X768 - and the GF3 had them pegged at 78 fps.

Any ideas? I am more than a little frustrated.

[[AK]Abaddon]

Just ran 3DMark 01SE - got 11711 on it. Seems slow.

I have a P4 1.9gHZ, overclocked to 2.5 gHz, with 512 mb of Rambus memory.

[[AK]Hylander]

What kind of video card did you have in it before? Did you make sure to remove all the previous drivers, etc before installation?

Also, you might want to check the default settings just to make sure something funky isn't selected, even though the 9700 can handle the AA, etc... something might be selected that will slow it down.

[[AK]Abaddon]

Yeah, I had a Geforce3 64mb before. I uninstalled the drivers and then plugged this card in. I canceled out of the auto-detect and installed the drivers off the CDROM (which have since been updated from the web). I also ran a program that hunted down Nvidia dlls and killed them. Looks like this thing is set up for quality in the control panel over speed. But dang it, that should not lower its performance to below that of a Geforce 3 in a game. It has TWICE the memory. Argh.

[[AK]Rocks]

I agree it seems slow. A fews guesses about your issue. How about reinstalling the AGP drivers for the Motherboard. Then, ensure your running 4x AGP. I had the same issue with the ALI chipset AGP drivers. The ALI chipset had a use the AGP registry setting that needed to be ON.

[[AK]Abaddon]

Here's a link to the 3DMark 2001 benchmark. I have the card clocked at 374/340.

I think the issue is that the Radeon comes with default setting for higher quality than my GF3's running settings were.

For instance, I cannot figure out how to completely turn off anti-aliasing. It seems to default to 2X. And it defaults to texture settings on maximum quality. Maybe that's an explanation. But I was really expecting a lot more gee-whiz factor from a $300 video card!

I will post my 3Dmark 2003 score in a moment.

[[AK]Abaddon]

Scored 4950 3DMarks in 3dMark 2003. The link to the details is below:

http://service.futuremark.com/servle...ojectId=561180

Any suggestions?

[Hale]

If you haven't done so already, you should make sure you are running the latest BIOS and chipset drivers. I've upgraded my video card twice, and had to update one or the other to get the new one running correctly each time.

[[AK]Abaddon]

My MB is the bottleneck, I feel sure. It's a $59 AOPEN. Of course, it was the only one I could find in San Antonio which supported RAMBUS. I'm confused about why everything says I have a 100mHz FSB. I know my actual FSB is faster than that ... or maybe I am just getting confused. Surely the bus to PC800 RAMBUS memory would be faster than that!

I have also discovered that there's an Nvidia driver in my system which I cannot remove - NV4_disp.dll or something of that sort. I delete it and it reappears again after a couple of seconds. Weird. My Nvidia cleaner caught it, but it is unable to delete it as well.

I hate to do it ... but it looks like it's time to do a fresh install of XP. I changed both my soundcard and video card - and that's too much hardware to put in without a fresh install. I am headed offline for a few hours :-(

[[AK]Rocks]

Have you tried Safe mode to remove and re-install the drivers?