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Vid card performance question


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Hi,

I have 2 machines that I mainly work on:

  • System 1 - AMD 1600+ on a Shuttle AK31 rev3.1 and 512MB (Crucial DDR2100)
  • System 2 - Dual AMD 1.2MP on a Tyan tiger MPX 2466 and 512MB (Crucial DDR2100)

On both machines I have the same VID card - Visiontek GF2 GTS 32MB DDR. Same monitors, same resolution. Both machines are with latest bios drivers and stuff...

Why is it that no matter which Nvidia drivers I use, the Video card on the Shuttle is way faster the the one on the Dual setup?

The one on the dual behaves like the old PCI vid card I had on my win95 machine... (P166) There is a long delay in model orbiting, while its droping frames and having hard time showing textures on movement.

 

Except for switching between the cards, I think tried it all. Any ideas?

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1. Opengl and direct3d are not multithreaded. They can not make use of the second cpu. Thus a faster single processor will ALWAYS beat a slower dual system. (Just take out the dual in dual 1.2, and your comparing a 1.4 Gigahertz XP vs a 1.2 palamino)

 

2. The Dual Amd rigs require specific chipset, inf, power, and agp drivers which are available from www.amd.com. If you have not installed these with windows 2000 sp2, you will experience performance degragation. (Sp2 includes athlon fixes)

 

3. Resolution has a big part in performance of geforce cards. ESPECIALLY with geforce 2's. If the resolutions don't match, neither will the performance. A Geforce 2 GTS's max performance ceiling is 1280x1024x16, anything above that, and you'll start dropping massive frames per second in some max/viz scenes. (It runs out of memory bandwidth).

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Greg, thanks for your reply.

I know that Opengl and direct3d are not multithreaded, but still I'm not too far between 1.2 and 1.4, plus the whole thing is the video card, not the CPU here, and the difference is huge.

I'm running XP pro on the dual machine and latest AGP drivers from AMD.

My current res is 1280x1024x32. I get same performance with 1280x1024x16. Thi thing is the same vid card works 100% fine for me on the Shuttle mobo.

 

I guess I'll have to switch vid cards between the machines and see if performance changes. In other words: its either VIA is way faster than AMD in terms of AGP bandwidth, or maybe I just have one bad GF2 card.

 

I'll post what I found out next week.

 

Thanks again.

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"plus the whole thing is the video card,"

 

Video cards are very cpu dependent. Most video cards are SIGNIFICANTLY faster then the available cpu's on the market. The vid cards spend a good number of their gpu cycles waiting for the cpu. Though as you said, I don't think this is your issue, but still want to make it clear that the cpu does effect video performance.

 

"I'm running XP pro on the dual machine and latest AGP drivers from AMD."

 

Are you running XP pro on the other machine? If your not, then thats the difference. Switch the Dual AMD back to win2k then test.

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Originally posted by bigcahunak:

I'm running XP pro on the dual machine and latest AGP drivers from AMD.

My current res is 1280x1024x32. I get same performance with 1280x1024x16.

I'm on a Tyan Tiger Dual 1600MP with an Asus 7100 Geforce2MX, running at 1600x1200 in XP. If I run MAX in 32bit colour its almost unusable in a scene of 75k polys or more. In 16bit colour I can go more than 3 times that and it still runs faster than 32bit.

 

Ever since I've used MAX its been much faster in 16bit. How do you get the same performance in both, I wonder?

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"How do you get the same performance in both, I wonder?"

 

My scene is no more than 15k poly... which is why I'm wondering about the whole thing.

 

I'll try switching vid cards, if that doesn't work - I'll go w2k. If that doesn't work... I'm going after Greg... LOL

 

Thank you both.

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Remember to install win2k sp2, and then all the amd chipset drivers from amd's site (all the 2002 ones).

 

Also dx 8.1, and then the nvidia driver version 21.83 WHQL, which I've found to be the most stable for both gf2 and gf3's.

 

You can get this driver version from www.reactorcritical.com, or www.guru3d.com.

 

If that doesn't work, then I'll try and hook you up with some "modified" maxtreme drivers.

 

Only other thing could be bios settings.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Originally posted by Greg Hess:

Remember to install win2k sp2, and then all the amd chipset drivers from amd's site (all the 2002 ones).

 

Also dx 8.1, and then the nvidia driver version 21.83 WHQL, which I've found to be the most stable for both gf2 and gf3's.

 

You can get this driver version from www.reactorcritical.com, or www.guru3d.com.

 

If that doesn't work, then I'll try and hook you up with some "modified" maxtreme drivers.

 

Only other thing could be bios settings.

Greg Greg Greg...

Guess what?

I finally got the time, and did as you advised - W2K with all the right drivers, SPs and patchs.

 

Vid card performs... exactly as it was before.

I really think I got a f*cked up card. Thats all.

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