3000 3DMarks with Radeon 9000 P4 1.6GHz HELP!

[rogue1979]

I agree, anyone buying now should go for a Radeon 8500LE. But a few months ago I picked up the 9000's for $67 apiece shipped, when Radeon LE's were still about $100. One thing in the 9000's favor, it does have just a slight edge in 2D over the 8500 series. However, I can't agree that the 7500 is about the same speed. Alot of games simply play faster framerates because they do have DirectX 8 hardware, software rendering works, but slows things down. And also remember there are a few benchmarks were the Radeon 9000 Pro actually beats a Radeon 8500 retail because it does a few things differently. I think most peoples' attitude is to campare the 8500 and 9000 akin to the GF4 Ti and GF4 MX solutions. There is a much bigger performance difference between the Geforces then between the Radeons.

DIGIT LIFE: A P4 2.2ghz and Rambus can only manage 32-34FPS at 1024x768 on Rad9000 and that's without AA or AF on in both UT2003 and Commanche4. 60FPS is what most people consider to be playable.

Now bearing in mind a Rad8500LE is a good 15% faster than the Rad9000PRO which in turn is 20% faster than the Rad9000 ...


I am sure that was at stock speed, the three Saphire 9000's I have hit at least 290/240, quite a boost from the 250/200 default. The 9000 can play UT2003 smoothly at 1280x 1024 x 32, 16-tap, no FSAA, while no speed demon, that's still pretty good performance in my book. I'd like to see the 7500 do that, has anyone given it a try? According to those calculation an 8500LE is 35% faster when both are at stock speeds. So an improvement on 32-34fps would then be 43-46fps. That still doesn't hit the magic 60fps you think most people consider playable. Did DIGIT LIFE throw the 7500 benchmarks in there? I don't have a 7500 here to test, but I gotta insist that the 9000 has a definate performance advantage over the 7500. Someone out there prove me wrong
Some in house, hands on testing will be the proof in the pudding, not just some rehashed, tired, and biased reviews. I have gotten cynical and burned out on commercial reviews, I put much more stock in a forum member out there cranking out the games themselves and giving us the heads up here. I like Radeons, I like Geforces, bang for the buck is what gets it for me.

 

[Mingon]

Have you installed the agp motherboard driver ? perhaps some more spec would give a clue, as you can see my baby shuttle is outperforming your P4 which should not happen in anything let alone 3dmark2001. also check that AA or AF are not running and vsync is disabled when you do the tests as these could drop the score. Can you post a link to your score ?

 

[toolfan]

Mingon, yes I installed the Intel INF utility which features AGP support. I don't know of any other drivers for the mboard. It is an Epox 4G4A. AA, AF, and VSync were all disabled via Powerstrip. Could that have something to do with it? Maybe the Pstrip settings aren't taking properly. I also did turn everything down to Performance settings in the ATI control panel. Looks like GamersHQ is down right now so I can't publish the score at this time.

However, I did break down and bought an 8500. Picked up a 128MB 8500 built by ATI OEM (non LE) for $103 from ISquared. No dualhead, but I don't need that. Core is clocked at 275, they were unsure what the memory is at. So hopefully that will take care of my issues. I will be sure to post an update when I get that one installed.

 

[Mingon]

If its a vsync problem your frame rates at the end of a 3dmark run will show fps no more than 60.

 

[AnAndAustin]

Don't forget rogue1979 that you can't simply add up the percentages, mathematics doesn't work like that! Of course it will vary by game but when you average it out you get very close to this:

9000=100% 9000PRO='9000'+20% 8500LE='9000PRO'+15% 8500='8500LE'+10%

So applying to a base Rad9000 FPS we get:

9000=30 9000PRO=36 8500LE=41 8500=46
9000=60 9000PRO=72 8500LE=83 8500=91

We can then work out how this relates to the Rad9000:

9000=100% 9000PRO=120% 8500LE=138% 8500=152%

Of course there's a quicker way (multiply the decimal equivilent each time) but that shows the method. So the Rad8500LE is about 38% faster than Rad9000 while the Rad8500 is 52% faster than the Rad9000.

 

[AnMig]

I have one of those newegg 9000 saphires oem 64mb for my daughters computer, xp1800,soyo dragon ,256 ddr crucial.

I know we have entirely different setups but I got 6000 3d marks point using default drivers. I used to get 8300 points with my retail 8500 64mb.

Since you are comparing 3dmarks scores in your sysytem. It is not unreasonable to deduce that you have some problems, snce the 9000 should not score less
than your previous video card.

what it is I dont know since I am naive to Intel setups good luck.

 

[rogue1979]

6000 in 3DMark sounds about right, I got 6300 on a 1800MHz XP.

You lost me there AnandAustin, but 35% or 38% is still almost the same

I wish you could base all your pecentages on your own testing, while reviews are helpful they are not completely accurate or consistent, and I flat out challenge the integrity of some of them, knowing they are biased because they have to get the bills paid.

I have mentioned it before, but according to most benchmarks out there the 8500 retail is the equal of a Geforce3 Ti500. I had a Radeon 8500LE @ 300/315 and now a Geforce3 Ti200 at @ 255/530 and they were close in 3DMark. But in games using both AA and AF the GF3 was outgunning the Radeon in all games, and in some by a large margin. I know, the Radeon takes a big dive with AA and the Geforce doesn't, but in the way I set up my games the Geforce was considerably faster. So if I would have chosen to just go by the published benchmark reviews, I wouldn't have bothered in picking up this Gainward Geforce3 Ti 450 for $69 shipped. And as I also mentioned before about image quality, while all Radeons are excellent the Geforce 2 and 3 chipsets are highly dependant on the manufacturer. I have owned several that are the equal of the Radeon, and several that definately were not.

My point is depending on how you use and set up a video card, you cannot rely on the published benchmarks to tell you specifically which card will give you the best performance in your own system. Some of those same benchmarks are claiming the Radeon 7500 approaches 9000 peformance, they must be relying to heavily on synthetic tests, not real world testing. Even though many tests use the same game engines as the real thing, it is not the same! Fragging the crap out of many players at once with explosions, smoke and weapons flashing in total chaos with an infinite amount of variables is the only way to test true video performance. Also the tweaking in your own system, video driver used, overclocking the video card, OS used, video settings and resolutions, specific games played, chipset used, fsb and memory speeds can make a huge difference on any video cards actual performance. Way too many variables for any luke warm benchmark review to declare which video card is faster, especially when many times the difference comes down to a few percentage points or fps. Obviously we can conclude from what we read that a Radeon 9700 is definately king of the hill, but depending on what is used, I have seen the lead over a G4 Ti4600 listed anywhere from 50% to 250%. If anything close to those differences exist for any other video cards, then what does that mean for us? Yes, I realize that it depends on the settings for the Radeon 9700 vs GF4 Ti4600 to get differences that large. But that is my point, we all use different settings!

 

[Mingon]

rogue 1979 - well said, the problem with most reviews is they are not very often done on mid - range systems (no offense toolfan), and the likely hood is that the difference between the 9000 and 8500 on his machine is going to be alot less than on a non - cpu limited system.

 

[AnAndAustin]

I hear a lot of the same stuff said about the 3Dmark test, of course it is even more relevant there but that's not to say that 3Dmark isn't still very useful for seeing a rough indication of what a current system should do or what new upgrade to go for, gfx card or CPU etc. Benchmarks are not to meant to be the 'be all and end all' but a good indication of what to expect, and so long as you base your opinions on a few reliable sites rather than just 1 and also look at what other sites are saying too it is IMHO more accurate than one or two users experience which are often biased and may even be completely fabricated. I think it's important to take all these things in proportion to make your judgements, nothing is definitive so all you can do is use as much info as possible to base your buying decisions or advice on. Anyway it's often very easy for someone with a little knowledge, experience and reading to catch the sites which can be a little more generous to some cards be it chipset or manu.

 

[merlocka]

Originally posted by: toolfan
I just installed a Sapphire Radeon 9000 128MB card, replacing my ATI AIW 7500. On the 7500 I was getting about 4500 in 3DMark. With the 9000 I can't get above 3000. This is with all default settings, no AA or anything. I have no idea what is wrong, I went so far as to format and reinstall WinXP but that didn't help. I've tried both the Catalyst 2.3 drivers and the ones that were on the Sapphire CD. Before the reinstall of Windows I tried installing both the Intel INF utility and the Application Accelerator, to no avail. Could it possibly be a bad card or something hardware related? This is on a Epox 4G4A mboard (latest BIOS), P4 1.6A, 512MB PC2100, WinXP. Thanks in advance for any input.

Although I agree with Deeko in that 3Dmark is a poor comparison tool, I do believe it holds some merit when comparing reasonably similar configurations. 3000 3Dmarks could indicate that you have something horked up.

It might be of benifit if you posted the link to the 3dmark results. Some insight can be gained by observing the raw scores.

 

[daveybrat]

I picked up the Saphire Radeon 9000 64MB for $69 for my brother's system a month ago, and it runs great on his system, no complaints at all, in fact
i'm jealous of his image quality. I've got a Geforce 4 TI4400 and i swear his desktop and games are crisper and more vibrant!
He has an Athlon XP 1700+ with 256MB Sdram and he gets 6100 in 3dMark.
All in all the card is an excellent budget card.

 

[toolfan]

Ok, here is the 3DMark project - Radeon 9000 - 2978 3D Marks.

I can't think of anything else I haven't checked. However, twice now when starting the computer it has produced that revolving police siren sound until it was reset. I thought that usually referred to a temp problem, but all temp warnings are disabled in the BIOS and I've never seen the CPU temp above about 45-47. I did not check the internal LED Post Code display of the Epox as it has only happened twice and went away after a reset. Possibly a problem with the card itself?

Looking forward to the new card which should arrive Thursday.

Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention - the 3DMark opening splash screen is completely garbled. Looks kind of like a monitor when it is displaying something out of the scan range. I haven't noticed any other display quirks aside from that.

 

[merlocka]

Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 65.6 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 351.8 MTexels/s

Well, perhaps 3dmark is good for something

Because the pixel and vertex shader numbers look reasonable, it doesn't seem like a issue with the gpu. The fillrate numbers are horribly low, perhaps indicating a problem with the memory system of your card. This could also explain some artifacts or "garbled" display. I wouldn't be suprised if the new card shows dramatically different results.

 

[Mingon]

Here is my score in the comparison linky their is something horibly wrong with your fill rate scores - it implies your core is running at 32 mhz but the multi texture rate is strange as it shows no direct relation to the single texture score.