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fast writes question

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pazrael

Junior Member
OK, I've got my stystem up and in windows, and I have tried Aquamark3, but I have only scored 19,200 on performance!

I am running DirectX 9b and Catalyst 3.9

I looked at SmartGart and noticed that the 9800XT was only listed as 4x

I forgot to install the INF update. Once I installed it, SmartGart automatically detected it as 8X,

However, when I ran Aquamark3 again, the score actually dropped to 19,000!

I then enabled fast writes, rebooted, tried again, now it is 47,000!

I am a little confused by this. From what I read, the 8x should have kicked the score up a lot, and the fast writes should not have made much of a difference. I noticed the opposite.

Very strange, anybody notice anything like this?

I am also a little concerned because I keep hearing that enabling fast writes causes problems...

My hardware is as follows:

Powercolor Radeon 9800XT
P4 3.2
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Antec TrueBLUE 480 PSU
Corsair 2x512 3200LLPro
2x WD 200gb SATA 7200 rpm HDD in RAID 0 configuration
Plextor PX-708A DVD-ROM
LiteOn 52x32x52 CD-RW
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Windows XP Professional SP1
 
8x shouldn't really affect the score at all, as most (all?) cards (even top end ones) don't need the extra bandwidth offered by AGP 8x.

I'm guessing it might be something else? But AGP 8x won't make that much difference.

I run a 9800Pro at 4x (all my board supports), and I think (for the system) I get about average performance for the card.
 
8X AGP is just a marketing ploy....you will see almost 0 performance improvement from using it over 4X AGP. In fact, most games today don't use the full bandwidth given by 4X AGP even.

Of course, fast writes isn't neccesarily supposed to bump your score by 100% - but then, maybe aquamark can make major use of that feature. Who knows....
 

so does that mean that i can drop a 9800 radeon pro into my current abit kr7a-133, which only supports 4x?

if so, that would be really nice cos i just want decent performance for some new games, and some upcoming ones.
sorry i'm a n00b.
 
I have a KR7A (not 133), same chipset and everything, but without RAID IIRC, and a 9800 non-pro running fine in it. You should be able to stick a Pro in there.
 
The AGP mode does nothing unless the scene is too large to fit into the graphics card's RAM. Unless that happens, AGP transfers don't ever happen.

Fast Writes on the other hand accelerate the transfer of geometry data from the CPU onto the graphics card.

And yes, power and cooling issues aside, any 4x capable mainboard can run any 8x graphics card. And vice versa.
 
Originally posted by: sugarkang
so does that mean that i can drop a 9800 radeon pro into my current abit kr7a-133, which only supports 4x?

if so, that would be really nice cos i just want decent performance for some new games, and some upcoming ones.
sorry i'm a n00b.
Click to expand...


yeah, it'll still work. The most performance you would lose would be 2-3 frames tops, but it's much more likely you won't lose any at all. You can benchmark and whatnot if those 2-3 frames really matter to you... :\
 
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