Benchmarks
So, after getting my new Asus Radeon 9600XT, I decided that I was going to do all kinds of cool things to maximize performance like overclocking and using specialized drivers. Unfortunately, almost nothing went as planned and when I finally sat down and benchmarked my card with 3dMark 2001 SE I found myself lagging about 5000 points (that's over 40%) to the results I found others had received on the internet. After a long round of fighting with many different specialized benchmarking programs and trying to decide what it is that is wrong with my card, I finally just decided to try to get the story from the horses mouth. The following are four different sets of results after benchmarking three separate games on this machine.
UT2K4
CTF-Face3 botmatch results
Minimum qualityHigh qualityPersonalized quality
640x48057.9945.1332.63
800x60058.0345.1832.60
1024x76857.8045.0132.48
1280x102456.7044.7335.97
Nothing... what an odd looking set of scores. Unfortunately, I can't say as it means a damn thing to me other than that my performance is not that great.
Far Cry
Research time demo results
Minimum qualityMaximum qualityUltra quality
640x48052.0030.3128.57
800x60053.9129.8527.27
1024x76853.8923.6121.30
1280x102452.5715.2913.93
Regulator time demo results
Minimum qualityMaximum qualityUltra quality
640x48053.2628.3725.06
800x60052.9226.9422.55
1024x76853.0023.7319.34
1280x102452.2012.0713.42
Now this is a little more interesting. Both graphs seem to hint at a similar problem. The scores decay at the end at a very natural rate, but the really easy tests at 640x480 with minimal graphics isn't all that impressive at all. Moreover, the whole column is suspicious when compared to both of it's neighbors in that it's completely uniform, like I've hit some other kind of well. Suspicions start to form, and then I go to the whopper:
Doom 3
Demo1
Low QualityMedium QualityHigh QualityUltra Quality
640x48027.527.927.227.1
800x60027.328.026.626.6
1024x76823.923.527.122.5
1152x86420.920.926.619.8
1280x102417.317.216.616.4
These numbers very much continue the trend and reinforce my fears. The fact that 640x480 on low quality is slower than 800x600 on medium quality tells me that something is really wrong here. As much as I'm impressed by the numbers on the far right, I think there is something wrong with the numbers on the left. I don't think there is a problem in my methodology, I think that my computer has a bottleneck that keeps me from attaining really high framerates. I'm using PC2100 RAM, that's pretty slow, that could be it. Or maybe it's my dual Athlon 2400+ procs. That may be a bit slow for a modern game like Doom 3. Any ideas anyone? If you have a 9600 or anything even remotely close or comparable to that, would you do me a favor and do a couple of quick timedemos at the extremely low quality/res settings and tell me if I'm completely off.
God I wish I knew what was wrong with this machine!
UT2K4
CTF-Face3 botmatch results
Minimum qualityHigh qualityPersonalized quality
640x48057.9945.1332.63
800x60058.0345.1832.60
1024x76857.8045.0132.48
1280x102456.7044.7335.97
Nothing... what an odd looking set of scores. Unfortunately, I can't say as it means a damn thing to me other than that my performance is not that great.
Far Cry
Research time demo results
Minimum qualityMaximum qualityUltra quality
640x48052.0030.3128.57
800x60053.9129.8527.27
1024x76853.8923.6121.30
1280x102452.5715.2913.93
Regulator time demo results
Minimum qualityMaximum qualityUltra quality
640x48053.2628.3725.06
800x60052.9226.9422.55
1024x76853.0023.7319.34
1280x102452.2012.0713.42
Now this is a little more interesting. Both graphs seem to hint at a similar problem. The scores decay at the end at a very natural rate, but the really easy tests at 640x480 with minimal graphics isn't all that impressive at all. Moreover, the whole column is suspicious when compared to both of it's neighbors in that it's completely uniform, like I've hit some other kind of well. Suspicions start to form, and then I go to the whopper:
Doom 3
Demo1
Low QualityMedium QualityHigh QualityUltra Quality
640x48027.527.927.227.1
800x60027.328.026.626.6
1024x76823.923.527.122.5
1152x86420.920.926.619.8
1280x102417.317.216.616.4
These numbers very much continue the trend and reinforce my fears. The fact that 640x480 on low quality is slower than 800x600 on medium quality tells me that something is really wrong here. As much as I'm impressed by the numbers on the far right, I think there is something wrong with the numbers on the left. I don't think there is a problem in my methodology, I think that my computer has a bottleneck that keeps me from attaining really high framerates. I'm using PC2100 RAM, that's pretty slow, that could be it. Or maybe it's my dual Athlon 2400+ procs. That may be a bit slow for a modern game like Doom 3. Any ideas anyone? If you have a 9600 or anything even remotely close or comparable to that, would you do me a favor and do a couple of quick timedemos at the extremely low quality/res settings and tell me if I'm completely off.
God I wish I knew what was wrong with this machine!