Whats my bottleneck??

[afirawker]

Recently I received my Sapphire Radeon 9600XT in the mail and swapped out my old Radeon 7200 and first went to play my favourite game (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on highest quality settings. Before it was on normal quality so I went high and changed the resolution from 800*600 to 1024*768. After doing that I noticed terrible lagg. Today the settings are at normal but the resolution is at 1024*768. So this started to piss me off, I just spent $250CAD on a new vid card and Im getting bad performance. So I was suggested to run 3DMark03 and so I downloaded it and ran the test to find out my score wasnt even 4000. My friend with a P41.6 and GForce4200 can get a better score. Since then ive been trying to find out what the problem is, so I tried the Catalyst 3.9,3.7 and now the 4.1 drivers which seem to be performing the best but still isnt what it should. I also tried reinstalling DirectX 9.0b which didnt help. So now im stumped here trying to find out whats holding my computer back, if you wanna see my specs then see my sig.

I dont know if this will help but back when I upgraded my system in the summer (got new mobo, CPU, and RAM) I wasnt able to use it for more then a minute or so. Clicking on the start button or bringing up task manager would cause the computer to hang then restart and say that it could not perform a drawing operation and restarted. After days of troubleshooting I found that the new drivers for my mobo fixed the problem but still seemed odd to me. That also caused me to reformat my computer with WinXP (has SP1).

So if you guys/gals could give me any advice whatsover it would be greatly appreaciated.
Thanks in advance

 

[Mavrick007]

I think your 3dmark03 score is about right. Possibly there is something else in your machine that is causing problems when you are running
Wolf ET. I didn't have any problems running Wolf ET but my 3dmark03 doesn't even run properly with my GF4 TI. I don't think your friend gets
even close to 4000 3dmarks for 2003 cause the Ti4200 is not a DX9 card.

Try some other game to see how it runs on your new card. I would bet that it should run a lot better.

 

[charlie21]

ET is a CPU-bound game. Benchmarks. Even if you had a 9800 XT in there it wouldn't make a difference in framerate. Your friend with the Ti4200 is not getting a better 3dMark03 score than you. He must be talking about 3dMark01. I have a Ti4200 @ Ti4600 speeds and I don't break 1000 on '03.

 

[afirawker]

 

[afirawker]

Sry, post above got messed up by browser. I went the post about ET but it still seems that im not even getting that performance. My framerate isnt that great and those benchmarks are at highest settings, which my system cant even run at.

 

[Markfw]

Welcome to the forums. I think you need some better memory(PC3200), and OC your Barton. That may make the difference you need. You should be able to get 2.1 ghz on stock cooling and voltage (190x11) and this will put you close to the 3200+ settings. If that doesn;t fix it, return the 9600XT, and get a 9700pro, they are faster, and very close in price.

 

[MadRat]

Sounds like the 9600 put your power supply over its maximum output. Is it a generic p/s?

 

[afirawker]

Yeah its a crappy generic PSU but im thinkin about getting an antec 380w PSU. But I dont think that that could be the problem...

 

[Special1Sauce]

Might be PSUs can be blamed for everything didnt win the lottery BLAME YOUR PSU!! lol

 

[afirawker]

...not quite

 

[sandorski]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is no way your friend has a better 3dMark 2k3 score than you, at default settings anyway.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: sandorski
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is no way your friend has a better 3dMark 2k3 score than you, at default settings anyway.

There is no way, in 3dMark2003, someone with a Ti4200 can beat someone with a Radeon9600XT, regardless of setting. A Radeon9700 Pro with a Pentium-II 350 is dead even with a Pentium-4 2.8C with a Radeon9600.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000242

As for the original poster:

You probably have AA/AF and Smooth-Vision turned on. That'll kill your FPS. Try turning those off and you should be fine.