I've had my Connect3D version of the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro card for 1 whole day now and I want to share my findings with everyone here.
1. Digital connector is Primary on bootup. The first thing I did was to remove my 2 older graphics cards from my system, an AGP Geforce 3 powering my 22" CRT and a PCI Geforce 2MX powering my 15" LCD (analog connection). With the 9700 I was able to plug both monitors into the 1 card, and for the first time I could use the digital connector on my LCD. During POST my system now defaults to the LCD to show all BIOS messages and Windows boot screens, with a cloned copy on my CRT via the VGA connector. I would like to change this if possible so my CRT isn't trying to match the res/refresh of the LCD, but it's not a big issue if it can't be done. Windows also used the digital connector as Screen 1 by default, but this was easily changed after driver installation.
2. Image Clarity. The VGA output quality on the card is superier to my Gainward GeForce 3. Even though the Gainward cards are usually top of the quality lists for their RAMDAC quality, I was pleased to see a noticable difference in the clarity of my 1280x1024 res with the ATI card.
3. Misleading card info. ATI's own control panel for showing info about the card says that I have a Radeon 9700 (not pro) and also says it has 128Mb of "SDR SGRAM 1:1 / SDRAM". I'm sure the card is using DDR Ram, but with Powerstrip also saying 310MHz for the RAM and not 620MHz its a bit confusing.
4. Control Panel problems with dual screens active. Even though only the main VGA screen is used for benchmarking and game playing, just having the second screen showing the windows desktop causes various problems. The first thing is that the ATI Control panels look completely different while both screens are active, instead of having sliders for quality adjustments there are popup menus. I wouldn't mind but the 2 different layouts also have a few different options (ie. You can set the quality of the FSAA as well as the 2x,3x settings in the single display panels but not the multi display ones). I expect this will be fixed in a later driver release. Also, with both screens active I am warned that I can only run 4x FSAA at upto 1024x768 in Direct3D, which is something I verified with an old game "Powerslide" (although 3DMark2001 seems to be able to switch on FSAA at any res). This is very annoying since I'm not using the second monitor for 3D but it has limited the resolution I can run the first screen with FSAA switched on.
5. Serious speed hit with both screens active. I haven't seen this one mentioned anywhere else yet, but if both outputs are being used for the Windows desktop, then there are serious issues with the performance of 3D graphics. I haven't been able to find much of a problem under Direct3D (other than the FSAA issue in point 4), but under OpenGL my benchmarks are unbarably bad. All my benchmarks are done with vsync switched off of course, but what I'm finding with OpenGL games is that framerates are caped somehow. Testing with an old game Kingpin the framerate is caped to 60 fps, even when both the LCD and CRT are set to 72Hz & 120Hz respectively. Under Quake 3 my framerates were capped to whatever the CRT was set to. This should not happen with vsync off. As soon as I disable the second output (the LCD) under windows, the benchmarks shoot up into the 200 fps+ mark.
6. 3DMark 2001 requires reboot between every test. It took me a while to realise this but unless you do a complete reboot between 3DMark tests, the scores go down rapidly. For instance on a clean boot I get 8592 marks with 1280x1024x32 4xFSAA 8xAF. If I run the test again straight away I get 6539. Why is this? I've even tried doing a memory recover using cacheman between tests but it doesn't help. It doesn't seem to be a problem when benchmarking D3D games, only with 3DMark.
7. How do I set refresh for games? I've always used Powerstrip 3 to set the refresh rates for all my gaming resolutions, but PS3 doesn't support this feature for the R300 yet. What other utility is there for hard wiring game resolutions to use 100/120Hz in the meantime? Something that doesn't add a load of other tweaking stuff, I just want to set the refresh atm until PS3 is updated.
8. Serious Sam 2 Problems. Using v1.07 of SS2 under Direct3D my machine freezes as soon as I start a game. Under OpenGL it works ok, but the Trueform technology screen doesn't seem to work (all objects are white). Does Trueform only work under Direct3D? Is there another game I can test this technology on?
Looking forward to your responses.
Rob
1. Digital connector is Primary on bootup. The first thing I did was to remove my 2 older graphics cards from my system, an AGP Geforce 3 powering my 22" CRT and a PCI Geforce 2MX powering my 15" LCD (analog connection). With the 9700 I was able to plug both monitors into the 1 card, and for the first time I could use the digital connector on my LCD. During POST my system now defaults to the LCD to show all BIOS messages and Windows boot screens, with a cloned copy on my CRT via the VGA connector. I would like to change this if possible so my CRT isn't trying to match the res/refresh of the LCD, but it's not a big issue if it can't be done. Windows also used the digital connector as Screen 1 by default, but this was easily changed after driver installation.
2. Image Clarity. The VGA output quality on the card is superier to my Gainward GeForce 3. Even though the Gainward cards are usually top of the quality lists for their RAMDAC quality, I was pleased to see a noticable difference in the clarity of my 1280x1024 res with the ATI card.
3. Misleading card info. ATI's own control panel for showing info about the card says that I have a Radeon 9700 (not pro) and also says it has 128Mb of "SDR SGRAM 1:1 / SDRAM". I'm sure the card is using DDR Ram, but with Powerstrip also saying 310MHz for the RAM and not 620MHz its a bit confusing.
4. Control Panel problems with dual screens active. Even though only the main VGA screen is used for benchmarking and game playing, just having the second screen showing the windows desktop causes various problems. The first thing is that the ATI Control panels look completely different while both screens are active, instead of having sliders for quality adjustments there are popup menus. I wouldn't mind but the 2 different layouts also have a few different options (ie. You can set the quality of the FSAA as well as the 2x,3x settings in the single display panels but not the multi display ones). I expect this will be fixed in a later driver release. Also, with both screens active I am warned that I can only run 4x FSAA at upto 1024x768 in Direct3D, which is something I verified with an old game "Powerslide" (although 3DMark2001 seems to be able to switch on FSAA at any res). This is very annoying since I'm not using the second monitor for 3D but it has limited the resolution I can run the first screen with FSAA switched on.
5. Serious speed hit with both screens active. I haven't seen this one mentioned anywhere else yet, but if both outputs are being used for the Windows desktop, then there are serious issues with the performance of 3D graphics. I haven't been able to find much of a problem under Direct3D (other than the FSAA issue in point 4), but under OpenGL my benchmarks are unbarably bad. All my benchmarks are done with vsync switched off of course, but what I'm finding with OpenGL games is that framerates are caped somehow. Testing with an old game Kingpin the framerate is caped to 60 fps, even when both the LCD and CRT are set to 72Hz & 120Hz respectively. Under Quake 3 my framerates were capped to whatever the CRT was set to. This should not happen with vsync off. As soon as I disable the second output (the LCD) under windows, the benchmarks shoot up into the 200 fps+ mark.
6. 3DMark 2001 requires reboot between every test. It took me a while to realise this but unless you do a complete reboot between 3DMark tests, the scores go down rapidly. For instance on a clean boot I get 8592 marks with 1280x1024x32 4xFSAA 8xAF. If I run the test again straight away I get 6539. Why is this? I've even tried doing a memory recover using cacheman between tests but it doesn't help. It doesn't seem to be a problem when benchmarking D3D games, only with 3DMark.
7. How do I set refresh for games? I've always used Powerstrip 3 to set the refresh rates for all my gaming resolutions, but PS3 doesn't support this feature for the R300 yet. What other utility is there for hard wiring game resolutions to use 100/120Hz in the meantime? Something that doesn't add a load of other tweaking stuff, I just want to set the refresh atm until PS3 is updated.
8. Serious Sam 2 Problems. Using v1.07 of SS2 under Direct3D my machine freezes as soon as I start a game. Under OpenGL it works ok, but the Trueform technology screen doesn't seem to work (all objects are white). Does Trueform only work under Direct3D? Is there another game I can test this technology on?
Looking forward to your responses.
Rob
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