Anyone using Passmark's Preformance Test to benchmark video cards?

[videobruce]

I run Preformance Test to benchmark since it is a small program and gives a nice report that doesn't have alot of bells and whistles:

http://www.passmark.com/index.html

I get a big hit when I check 'set all' under advanced/3D graphics and run the test at 1024x768x16 (or any other resolution for that matter). If I uncheck 'Wireframe Mode' the rate goes from 16FPS to over 200FPS. On my old GeForce2 card the hit was from aroung 100 down to 65FPS. This is the response I got from Passmark:

"I think the explanation is simple. Your video card drivers are creating
(rendering) the 3D scene in software and not hardware. You don't seem to
have hardware acceleration for line mode.

We have a P4 3Ghz with Radeon 7500 with two LCD screens attached. On the
left screen we get about 440 fps for the simple test. On the right screen we
only get 29fps. This is the difference of having hardware support. There is
not much you can do about it, except swap drivers and hope. On the other
hand there are not too many applications using wire frame mode so there is
no need to worry too much about it. Games don't use it much but 3D design
programs do."

Any comment from anyone about this? I e-mailed Sapphire (the cards manufacture) and ATI about this.

I'm using:
Sapphire 9100 w/Catalist 3.1
2100b
8RDA nForce2 MB w/V2.03 UDP
2x 256 DDR333 Crucial
Win2k w/sp3
DX 8.1b

 

[Lonyo]

Performance

I'm not totally sure what you're asking, since their reply was about dual ouputs.

Maybe the card can only do hardware (3D acceleration) to one monitor, while the other one needs to do software, since while it may have 2 RAMDAC's, only one is hardware powered (by the main GFX core), and the other has to use the CPU?
I'm guessing at that, since there's only one core it can only do one display.

Unless they're saying one monitor has the core of the graphics card powering it hence the high score, while the other has to rely on the computer, so it's slower, and think your card is using a software mode?
I don't know, but fiddle around with drivers as they said?

Feel free to rubbish my idea, partly cos I'm not totally sure what you're asking :/

 

[videobruce]

This software issue they brought up:

"Your video card drivers are creating
(rendering) the 3D scene in software and not hardware. You don't seem to
have hardware acceleration for line mode."

How do you "fiddle" with the hardware?

 

[Lonyo]

Have you tried any 3D games?
Did you check D3D hardware acceleration was enabled in Direct X settings?
Could be a problem if you didn't totally clean the old nVidia drivers, maybe try uninstalling the ATi drivers, getting detonator destroyer (guru 3d) and trying a complete reinstall, because the old nVidia drivers, if not totally eradicated, could cause some issues.

 

[videobruce]

Fresh install of 2k!
No to 3d games yet. Only have one and it is 1.6GB that I won't load untill later because of it's size.