Aces High Bulletin Board

General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: qts on April 06, 2003, 08:35:24 AM

Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 06, 2003, 08:35:24 AM: I've just upgraded from a dual P3-1000 to a P4-2400/533 (a natty little Shuttle system) and am seeing only a modest improvement in AH offline (haven't tried online yet). I run AH at 1600x1200x32.

Both systems use EIDE and Gf4-4200 video cards. Drivers are Detonator 43. Both machines have 1 GB RAM. Both systems run XP Pro and are fully updated as per WindowsUpdate. Neither machine is overclocked.

In AH, I load the Trinity map, and take a C205 to an enemy vehicle base. I get 60-80 fps along the way, but this drops to 50-60 fps when attacking, and < 30 fps when I fly through the smoke.

If I enable Quincunx FSAA, those figures are cut by 2/3.

I've tried 3DMark 2003: my P3-1000 scores 1009, which is about right, but my P4 only scores 1296.

I've read about nVidia's concerns, so I benchmarked UT2003 at 1024x768 (fresh install and unpatched - haven't Epic heard of DVDs?), no tweaking, and my P3-1000 scored 82 on Flyby and 31 on Botmatch, whereas my P4-2400 scored 136 and 56 respectively.

I've gone through the BIOS tweaking where necessary - e.g. telling the computer that the memory is DDR333, not DDR266 with little effect.

I've got the usual system tray stuff running

Am I getting correct results? If not, how can I increase them?
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 06, 2003, 09:23:42 AM: Just tried online and the results are miserable. Top FPs was low 40s, getting down to 20 or so in action and 11(!) in smoke. And jerky. X2 FSAA was no better.

This is about the same as on my old machine. I must have something set wrong.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: beet1e on April 06, 2003, 10:22:26 AM: qts -
Quote
In AH, I load the Trinity map, and take a C205 to an enemy vehicle base. I get 60-80 fps along the way, but this drops to 50-60 fps when attacking, and < 30 fps when I fly through the smoke.
Doh! That's about the same as I get with my 1.2GHz Athlon on A7V133 mobo with 512MB SDRAM memory. sorry to ruin your day! But AH performs just fine...
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Ghosth on April 06, 2003, 10:36:04 AM: If your suffering from fps try 800x600.

You'll find FPS may raise dramaticly, and
planes are bigger, makes em easier to hit.

Give it a try.

Other than that, make sure nothing running in background, & see what monitor refresh rate is at.

"Optimal" may not BE optimal.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 06, 2003, 03:35:22 PM: On a 2.4 GHz machine, Ghosth?
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Ghosth on April 06, 2003, 08:05:38 PM: There are a LOT of things that can degrade performance, even on a 2.4 ghz machine.

Start troubleshooting by going back to basics, build upwards is the way I learned.

You disagree?
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Pfunk on April 06, 2003, 09:44:18 PM: Back up your stuff and reformat, I bet you didnt reformat your HD when you swapped out the motherboard and processor eh? Simple rule I learned along time ago with computers, reformating and reinstalling watermelon fixes 90% of your problems. Oh yeah and dont use the newest Det drivers they suck. Go back to 41.09
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: bloom25 on April 06, 2003, 10:18:40 PM: What are your Direct3d settings? (Is anistropic filtering enabled?)

3dMark 2003 is nearly useless as a benchmarking tool unless your card supports DX9. (A GeForce 4 does not, thus many tests that are very heavily weighted do not run.) Run 3dMark 2001 SE.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 07, 2003, 04:55:38 AM: This is a fresh install of XP on a blank disk, and a fresh install of AH. Fresh everything, in fact - as might be inferred from my benchmarks.

Aniso is disabled. Otherwise settings are at default. I've tried enabling Mipmaps without any effect.

FSAA doesn't actually look good on the Gf4 which is odd.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Siaf__csf on April 07, 2003, 06:41:12 AM: Heh I got your offline fps online with my old 1.4gig athlon + Gf2 MX400 lol.

Offline looking at sky the fps rocketed to 270. Online was 75ish in flight and 25-30 in heavy smoke.

Now my fps is capped at monitor refresh (85) and never plunges under 60 with XP1900+ and Gf3ti200. OS is windows2000 pro.

Probably your heatsink is loose and your pentium is throttling all the time :)
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 07, 2003, 11:13:09 AM: Good one. I'll check that immediately I get home.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 07, 2003, 06:19:11 PM: Checked heatsink and removed excess thermal compound. FSAA performance is still cr*p.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 08, 2003, 02:17:05 PM: 3D Mark 2001 result is 7888 (1024x768, noFSAA, default settings). CPU temp is 49 degrees C.

Is this a normal result? If so, what's up with AH?
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Siaf__csf on April 08, 2003, 04:39:01 PM: Umm.. FSAA performance is supposed to be crap with Geforce4. You didn't know they only work with 16-bit and no fsaa? :)

If you want fsaa you need to buy R9700.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: whels on April 08, 2003, 05:43:16 PM: Quote
Originally posted by Siaf__csf
Umm.. FSAA performance is supposed to be crap with Geforce4. You didn't know they only work with 16-bit and no fsaa? :)

If you want fsaa you need to buy R9700.

be sure u install the latest drivers for the motherboard.
windows will just install generic one to get it to boot.

whels
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: whels on April 08, 2003, 05:46:54 PM: Quote
Originally posted by qts
3D Mark 2001 result is 7888 (1024x768, noFSAA, default settings). CPU temp is 49 degrees C.

Is this a normal result? If so, what's up with AH?

i have a XP2100 (1.74 ghz) and TI4400 GF4 and my 3dMark 2001
is about 11,300(defualt settings run)

Whels
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: bloom25 on April 08, 2003, 09:49:39 PM: That score seems very low. My Athlon 2400+ with GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (overclocked) scores around 12000.

Your CPU temperature seems high to me.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: 38ruk on April 09, 2003, 07:45:45 AM: how do you IRQ's look, any major components sharing with your video card? 38
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 09, 2003, 05:26:58 PM: This is an ACPI system so sharing isn't the same issue, but the Gf4 and one of the USB controllers appear on IRQ 16.

The temperature is on the high side, but it's not *that* high, and it's one of the dinky little Shuttle systems, stuffed to the gills, so I expect the temperature to be slightly high.

I've run SiSoft Sandra which indicates that the CPU side is well and good.

I've tried swapping the video card for another Gf4 4200, this time a 64 MB one, with a resultant drop in performance.

Siaf, the Geforce problems with FSAA were with the Gf3, not the Gf4.

I have found that 3D Mark 2001 reports that AGP Fast Writes and Sideband Addressing are both supported but disabled, and there does not appear to be any way of enabling them, either in the BIOS (which is the latest I've found, 16 Dec 2002) or in XP.

The motherboard is an Intel 845GE-based SB51G. The onboard video is turned off.

Am I on the right track?
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Siaf__csf on April 13, 2003, 12:18:18 PM: Qts: All nvidia products suffer greatly from FSAA and anisotropic filtering - when compared to ATI products. It hasn't changed at all with the introduction of GF4 or even FX.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: qts on April 13, 2003, 01:16:41 PM: As noted in the new thread I'd started, I've fixed the fault: the motherboard driver has to be installed *first*. I'm now getting good performance with FSAA enabled and over 10,600 in 3D Mark 2001.
Title: Correct performance?
Post by: Siaf__csf on April 13, 2003, 02:08:37 PM: Qts: While that had nothing to do with my statement, I'm glad to hear you got it fixed.