9700 Pro performance not what it should be?

[Eck]

I had to start last night before anyone replied to what order, so I installed them in this order:

Via 4 in 1
Catalyst Driver
Control Panel
SP1

Then I benchmarked on 3dmark 2001. I got a score around 11500. A slight improvement..

Then today I installed DirectX 9 and only got a score of 11100-ish.

The games I've tried playing aren't showing much improvement over my GeForce2. I'm running out of ideas. Maybe it's my power supply? I'm going to try some of the things in this thread and in some other threads in that forum. I really hope I can make this work like it should...

 

[Luna64]

Yea... I am with Sazar on that.

Always install SP1 before you do anything else.

Otherwise you might install pre-SP1 drivers.

 

[Sazar]

do try the card in another system and see what happens

it'll help out to see if the card itself may be faulty..

and make sure you benchmark with no AA and FSAA enabled

 

[Eck]

I don't have another system to test it out in.

In the benchmarks FSAA and AA are off. :huh:

Edit: I also tried uninstalling the catalyst, reinstalling directx 9, installing catalyst. Didn't help. Also tried increasing the AGP voltage to 1.7. It caused it the card to lock up.

I'm beginning to think these drivers are crap.

 

[Sazar]

if you have a friend who can host your card and run some benches... thats basically what I am trying to say

 

[Eck]

Originally posted by Sazar
if you have a friend who can host your card and run some benches... thats basically what I am trying to say

I can't think of any friends that have parents that would let me mess around with their system like that. :-/

 

[Eck]

Just installed the catalyst 2.5 and received 11795 3D Marks. A slight improvement.. but my frame rate in "real games" still isn't much better than my GeForce 2 Pro. This is becoming frustrating.

 

[Black-Syth]

My cousin has the exact same problem.... with a 2.66 p4 and 512 ddr, he only gets 13000 in 3dmark 2001 SE, and there are MANY glitches in games... im curious as to what your solution will be...

 

[Sazar]

Originally posted by Eck
Just installed the catalyst 2.5 and received 11795 3D Marks. A slight improvement.. but my frame rate in "real games" still isn't much better than my GeForce 2 Pro. This is becoming frustrating.

sooo... did you format?

lol... j/k

there could me one of many problems... I dunno if it is the card or your motherboard or what...

people @ rage3d may be more able to help you out since they are more experienced with this product...

reason I think there is a problem? my system @ STOCK speeds and everything gives a score of 12228 marks... your system by virtue of its specs should be scoring in the region of around 13000 or so ... stock... no oc's

I really cant say what the problem is @ the moment...

are you getting any errors or anything else that may indicate that there is a problem ?

 

[Eck]

No, I'm not getting any errors or anything. But there is another WEIRD thing that I noticed. I can do a game with the direct3D performance bar at balanced and get 30-40 frames per second in a game. Then I turn everything to the highest, and I still get 30-40 frames per second in a game. I found this extremely odd. Unlike with the catalyst 3.0, I would turn everything to high and my frame rate would plumit to 10-15 fps. I'm almost certain it's the drivers... hopefully ATI will put out some better drivers soon.

Edit: I have posted in rage3d forums: http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33665213

Doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

 

[Sazar]

I can't imagine its the drivers... the 3.0 set does clear up a lot of problems that people had... personally like I have said i have never had a problem with my card

it could be the particular card/could be the setup with the rig or something else.. incl drivers but I don't think thats a problem per se... certain driver sets clear some quirks in some systems... but not sure whats going on with your system...

ati does include a diagnostic little tool... get a system report and get in touch with ati if you can.. or if its a 3rd party card... get some info from them concering what to do...

 

[Eck]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think I may have figured out my problem: IRQ conflict.
My 56k modem and radeon 9700 pro are both on IRQ 16! Could this be my problem? Have a look:
http://dellepro.dellhost.com/eck/irqs.jpg

 

[Eck]

Now, how do I change the IRQs, and which one would I change, the modem or the video?

I looked in the BIOS, I can either let the bios assign or reserve certain IRQs, but 16 isn't one of them. I can also enable or disable VGA IRQ assigning. I have "PnP OS installed" set as "yes." There is also another thing in my bios called "system performance." I guess they added it in the latest bios update. Right now it is set to "normal" and other options are "fast" and "turbo" but I really doubt this has anything to do with it.

hmmmm....

 

[Eck]

Originally posted by Sazar
I can't imagine its the drivers... the 3.0 set does clear up a lot of problems that people had... personally like I have said i have never had a problem with my card

it could be the particular card/could be the setup with the rig or something else.. incl drivers but I don't think thats a problem per se... certain driver sets clear some quirks in some systems... but not sure whats going on with your system...

ati does include a diagnostic little tool... get a system report and get in touch with ati if you can.. or if its a 3rd party card... get some info from them concering what to do...

incl drivers? What are those?

Where can I access/download ati's tool?
And the card is "built by ATI."

 

[Sazar]

incl == including

email ati techsupport and they will walk you through how to do things...

 

[Eck]

Originally posted by Sazar
incl == including

email ati techsupport and they will walk you through how to do things...

I did. I received the automated response, but not a human response yet.

 

[Eck]

Ok, so I switched the modem to another PCI slot. The video card was using 16, and now the modem is on 19 -- good, so I thought. I ran a 3D Mark and receieved 12161 3D Marks, a slightly better score. The performance in games wasn't much improved. So an IRQ conflict? Probably not. It says "no conflicts" in device manager anyway... not that windows is always right or anything.

But, after I had switched my modem to another PCI slot, I couldn't dial out. I got this error. So I couldn't get on the internet, and this didn't solve my not so good performance issue. Weird thing is, I could go into device manager, go to my modem's properties, click on the diagnostics tab, and click query, and it would say everything is fine (with the modem on a different PCI slot when it wouldn't let me dial out). I didn't try reinstalling my internet software... dunno if that would have helped.

But the point here is, I don't think it was an IRQ conflict. Back to the drawing board.

Edit: Now with the modem back in its original slot, with both the modem and video card on IRQ 16, I just received 12214 3D Marks. Definately not an IRQ conflict, and my 3D Mark score keeps slowly going up, without me doing anything.

 

[Speed4Ever]

Originally posted by Eck
Well Sazar, I definately don't think it's a bad card. Everything is perfect except for a few things. For example, I get around 100 FPS in the nature game in 3D Mark SE 2001. Yet, in games, I get performance barely better than my GeForce 2?

I've checked all the direct3d settings and whatnot. I've tried setting them high and low.

I'll definately try the driver and registry stuff.

Edit: And if that doesn't work, I'll format. ARGH.

Many games are CPU locked, so this may possibly be your bottleneck. A good test is to raise the resolution incrementally while setting IQ settings to high, and seeing if you can still play at a reasonable speed.

I find that cames like the various MS flight sims can be played at high resolutions with high AA/AF, sometimes at 1600x1200 with high IQ setings. This would mean that my CPU is holding me back, etc.

This card has incredible bandwidth to fill up, and usually doesnt slow down till either the fillrate or the memory are filled up.

Various games perform differently, of course.

 

[Eck]

Originally posted by Speed4Ever
Many games are CPU locked, so this may possibly be your bottleneck. A good test is to raise the resolution incrementally while setting IQ settings to high, and seeing if you can still play at a reasonable speed.

I find that cames like the various MS flight sims can be played at high resolutions with high AA/AF, sometimes at 1600x1200 with high IQ setings. This would mean that my CPU is holding me back, etc.

This card has incredible bandwidth to fill up, and usually doesnt slow down till either the fillrate or the memory are filled up.

Various games perform differently, of course.

Uh, I've got a 2400 MHz Pentium 4 Northwood. I don't think my CPU is my problem.