Higher 3DMark2001SE Score But Worse FPS?

[BlameTheBigBang]

Let me start off by saying that I am not a serious PC gamer. My system is not that great. I basically play GTA3 and Vice City, and occasionally BF1942. My specs are as follows:

PIII 933mhz
384mb SDRAM
Visiontek Xtasy 9100 128mb DDR PCI
Onboard sound

I just recently upgraded from a PNY GeForce2 MX400 64mb PCI to the Xtasy 9100 PCI. I don't have an AGP slot on my mobo, so I was limited to PCI cards only. I'm not interested in upgrading my mobo or CPU, and the Xtasy 9100 is supposedly the best PCI card currently available.

So anyway, I ran 3DMark2001SE before I installed the new card, and afterward. My score with the GeForce2 was (don't laugh please) 1858. The score after I installed the new card was 4864. I thought, wow, that's a 262% increase. Vice City should run great now.

But after firing up GTA Vice City with the new card, my FPS were actually somewhat worse. I had around 25-30 FPS before, but it would get really choppy at times and drop down to around 15-20 FPS. I figured the new card would get me a solid 30 FPS, which was all I really cared about. NOT SO! My FPS are actually worse now that I've upgraded my video card.

Has anyone seen this before where the 3DMark score went up considerably while FPS in your favorite game actually went down??? What's going on here???

 

[Schadenfroh]

GTA series is poorly optomized for ATI cards, btw, did you remove all traces of nvidia drivers?

since they are PCI you could run your games with the geforce2mx and run your benchmarks with the Raddy

 

[BlameTheBigBang]

Yes. I've carefully removed all traces of nVidia drivers. I can't believe I'm about to uninstall my new shiny Radeon 9100 and put back in my old sh*tty GeForce2 MX400. Am I in an alternate universe or something?

 

[Boogak]

Welcome to the wonderful world of artificial benchmarks, where hardware manufacturers can tune drivers for maximum scores. Did you just use the Control Panel uninstall method to get rid of your old nVidia drivers or did you also use something like DriverCleaner to totally remove every last trace of it? That will make a big impact on your FPS.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Reformat.
Install Catalyst drivers.
Enjoy.

- M4H