3d gaming is slow

[stevecat]

Hey all,

I've got a bit of a problem and I dont know how to fix it. I recently acquired an X1900 Crossfire edition and X1900 XT graphics cards. When I first got the cards, I plugged them in and ran a few benchmarks - I got scores of 10 000++ in 3dmark06 and all was good in my life.

Last week though, something changed (and im not sure what), but in crossfire or single card mode, i'm not getting scores higher than 2000 in 3dmark06 and in quake 4, far cry, ut2004 and all my games, im getting really crappy frame rates. I thought it might be the drivers so I formatted for a clean wnidows install and have tried the Catalyst 6.5 and 6.6 drivers on fresh WinXP Pro installs. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing the problem and how to fix it?

My system specs are below for reference;

Intel Pentium EE 955 (3.46GHz dual core)
Intel 975XBX motherboard
Corsair XM2-5400UL
2x 500GB Seagate 7200.9 (in RAID 0 array)
ATI Radeon X1900 Crossfire setup (using the master card and an XT version as the slave)
Scythe Kamariki II 550W PSU

 

[xtknight]

After the reinstalls you still get poor performance?

I heard ATI had issues with the new Intel chipsets from one of the AT articles. Don't worry, I'm sure if it worked once they will be able to get a driver update out to fix it forever.

 

[stevecat]

Yes, after reinstalls of windows xp pro and windows x64 edition (the problem exists in both), i still have bad performance.

I dont know whats causing it though, fresh installs clean the driver slate and it did work when i first got the cards.

 

[xtknight]

It talks about the ATI/975 problem at the end of this page. (I don't know how it could be the CPU itself.)
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797&p=13

Maybe you can see what happens when you disable one CPU core and use a different timer. This is just for debugging. Can you add this to your boot.ini line? /usepmtimer /onecpu

For instance:

Old:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

New:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer /onecpu

 

[stevecat]

I'll try it when i get home tonight and let you know how it goes.