Oddly sluggish Radeon 7500LE performance (PCI)

[Demon-Xanth]

I got a GC for my b'day and ended up getting a PCI Radeon 7500LE, 64MB DDR. I didn't want to give up the dualhead from my Matrox G450 and thought that I could use my G450 for the second and third monitors instead of the first and second and use the ATI card as the primary (I had a Matrox Millenium for the third)
*end long and boring story*

I've tried two sets of drivers and have been trying to get some performance out of it with disappointing results:

Under NASCAR Heat (one of my few 3D games):
TNT card in a 450P2:
30FPS in 640x480-1024x768
TNT in a 1GHz Athlon:
50FPS in all resolutions
G450 in an AthlonXP 2000+:
45FPS in 640x480-30FPS in 1024x768
PCi 7500LE in the same AthlonXP system:
20-25 FPS in all resolutions


Anyone have any ideas?
(currently the #1 idea is to put my MGA back and try and get a few bucks back from the ATI card in the FS boards)

 

[Mloot]

Is your 7500 from Powercolor? Also, how large is your case? Reason I'm asking is that I seem to remember the 7500 having a passive heatsink. Is it possible it is overheating? I have a slim-line case and was going to get the 7500 pci, but I was concerned about heat build-up. Ended up getting a GeF4MX with a fan, instead. That's the first thing I would look at.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

It's CompUSA brand (dunno who actually makes it), the side of the case isn't on yet but the heatsink is actually fairly cool to the touch. I doubt heating is an issue. (it's between the G450 and a SCSI card right now too). The card itself is pretty damn small.

Edit: there's no artifacts, just not real quick.

 

[rbV5]

If it was overheating, artifacts would be the result rather than poor performance. My guess is that you have old driver remnants involved. If it were me, I'd Go to Rage3d and download Rage3d Tweak and the latest catalyst drivers/software from ATI, then go to the forums and check the AIW forums and read the driver install threads. I'd set that Radeon up completely all by itself, and then benchmark it to verify its setup properly. Then I'd go about setting up the matrox card.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Tried the tweak, didn't make any difference. Got a link to the AIW forums?

 

[rbV5]

Scroll down the list.

 

[kurt454]

Your problem is it is a PCI card. I have a Geforce2 MX400 PCI vid card which is actually slower in games than an old 8 meg Rage Pro AGP card. I am assuming your other cards are AGP? PCI bus murders framerates.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Yeah, that's what I was beginning to think. It'd work good for someone needing a secondary card that can work at a high res or someone that needs a complete feature set. But at this point (I'm at work right now) it's taxing my attention span. I think I can return it and take a 15% loss (but considering that 66% was funded by a gift card I'd still be ahead) or try to trade it on the FS/FT boards for a DIMM.

Looking at the install instructions on that forum it looks like I wasn't too far off, I had installed the latest drivers first.

I guess I had just underestimated the difference between AGP and PCI.