Catalyst and ATT settings

[Niflheim]

Hey there,

I have a pentium 4, 1gb of ram and a radeon x850xt agp and i wonder if i could improve my video card's performance a bit. Right now, i score ±5600 in 3dmark05 (wich i think is kinda what i should get). My question is about all these settings in Catalyst Control Center and Ati Tray Tools (i mostly use this one).

There are just so many of them, could changing a couple make a difference? Now i reseted them to defaults. I have like mipmap and texture at high quality, trueform at AP, flip queue size (?) at 0, catalyst AI at low, forzed z buffer path disabled, no "optimizations"... I have no idea what most of this stuff means. Oh and in SMARTGART, fast write, agp write and agp read are all checked, should they?

Yeah well to resume, what settings should i use to get my performance at its maximum?

Thanks

 

[Munky]

The only definite way to improve performance is to overclock the card. Changing other settings, like textures/filtering and optimizations, may gain you a bit more performance at the expense of image quality.

 

[tvdang7]

5600 ish is kinda low for your card is it not? my x800 xl got 5000+ my x800xt got 6000+ and i havnet benched my current x850 yet. all stock clocks too. maybe driver cleaner and the newest 6.3's will help a little. unless ur cpu's like 1-2.5 ghz maybe then i guess thats reasonable.

 

[Munky]

It's a P4, so it will likely score a few hundred points below a typical A64 score for that card.

 

[Niflheim]

I have the 6.3 drivers and i just Dbanned my hard drive two days ago, so i dont think its a driver problem.

What about overclocking? It may make a difference? I already used the overclocking thing in ATT, the one that does it automatically. But it didnt really worked. Must have done something wrong. How do i do it?

 

[Munky]

To have the card overclocked you have to make ATT start up automatically when windows loads to apply the overclock. You can also set up different 2D and 3D profiles, so that it only overclocks the card when it's running a 3D app. An OC of only 10 mhz will most likely not give you a noticeable improvement, but if you OC for example from 520 mhz to 580 or more, then you should get a decent improvement in performance, somewhere ~10%.

 

[Chadder007]

Whats the speed of your processor ?

 

[Niflheim]

Oh sorry, i have a 3.0ghz

 

[Niflheim]

Anything about overclocking? I did "find max" with ATT and i have now 546/552 instead of 520/540.

 

[VERTIGGO]

I did that with my x850xt, went from 520/540 to 580/590, but even then the fps difference was so little I didn't see any reason to keep risking the chip.

 

[Munky]

As long as you keep the stock voltage and the temps under 80C, there's not much risk in OC'ing the video card.

 

[dguy6789]

The rig in my sig scores around 6400 in 3DMark05 stock.

 

[Niflheim]

So if overclocking doesnt change much, where are my 400-600 points?
Ar.