I have this nagging suspicion that I'm not getting anywhere NEAR the performance I ought to be getting from my videocard, and I'm not sure if either a) my expectations are screwy or b) there is something wrong with my card. I'm hoping that someone can point me towards either theory A or theory B.
First, the hardware: Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB running at stock speeds. I have an LCD monitor, and I run games at its base resolution of 1280 x 1024.
I am currently running Catalyst 4.3s with both OpenGL and Direct3D set to "Balanced." When playing Unreal Tournament 2004, I can run the game at "Holy Shit!" settings (all sliders all the way to the right) and maintain a very high framerate in most game modes. The lowest framerates are in Onslaught, Assault, and certain unoptimized custom DM maps (DM-CBP2-Tydal comes to mind), and they still stay above 60 FPS. However, I do get some visual artifacts (tiny white rectangles, 1-2 pixels per side) which flicker occasionally, and some textures come out a little strange (the grass on DM-Antalus, for example).
When I change the video card settings to manually control anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the frame rates drop significantly. DM matches with no AA/8x AF now have frame rates which dip down to the 30s when a lot is taking place on the screen, and seems to top off in the 70-80 FPS range. Turning on AA REALLY kills frame rates.
Halo runs like a dog -- although that apparently happens to everyone -- and I get significant visual artifacting in that game as well. The screen is COVERED with small white flickering rectangles (looks a little bit like snow), and some flashing polygons as well. Turning on AA/AF removes the "snow," but the flickering polygon problem remains.
As a last data point, I ran 3DMark03 and got a score in the 5800 range, which seems respectable. However, there were all KINDS of visual artifacts during the tests -- flickering polygons galore, much worse than in any game.
So what's going on?
EXPECTATIONS: Am I crazy for thinking that I should be getting better performance, or is something going wrong? Is the fact that I'm running at 1280 x 1024 the main reason that my performance is lagging? (That would be surprising, given how many people run at 1600 x 1200...) Is there a huge difference between benchmarks and in-game performance?
HARDWARE: I have three case fans, but no special cooling on the card itself -- do you think that I have a possible overheating problem? Could any of the symptoms be related to getting a defective card, or would it simply fail to work if it were not quite right out of the box? Would heat or a bad card affect framerates?
SOFTWARE: Do I have any symptoms of driver update issues? Could poor performance be a configuration issue with the drivers or the games? What does "application preference" mean with respect to UT2k4's "Holy Shit!" settings, since there is no in-game AA/AF selection?
Thanks for any ideas you may have...
First, the hardware: Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB running at stock speeds. I have an LCD monitor, and I run games at its base resolution of 1280 x 1024.
I am currently running Catalyst 4.3s with both OpenGL and Direct3D set to "Balanced." When playing Unreal Tournament 2004, I can run the game at "Holy Shit!" settings (all sliders all the way to the right) and maintain a very high framerate in most game modes. The lowest framerates are in Onslaught, Assault, and certain unoptimized custom DM maps (DM-CBP2-Tydal comes to mind), and they still stay above 60 FPS. However, I do get some visual artifacts (tiny white rectangles, 1-2 pixels per side) which flicker occasionally, and some textures come out a little strange (the grass on DM-Antalus, for example).
When I change the video card settings to manually control anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the frame rates drop significantly. DM matches with no AA/8x AF now have frame rates which dip down to the 30s when a lot is taking place on the screen, and seems to top off in the 70-80 FPS range. Turning on AA REALLY kills frame rates.
Halo runs like a dog -- although that apparently happens to everyone -- and I get significant visual artifacting in that game as well. The screen is COVERED with small white flickering rectangles (looks a little bit like snow), and some flashing polygons as well. Turning on AA/AF removes the "snow," but the flickering polygon problem remains.
As a last data point, I ran 3DMark03 and got a score in the 5800 range, which seems respectable. However, there were all KINDS of visual artifacts during the tests -- flickering polygons galore, much worse than in any game.
So what's going on?
EXPECTATIONS: Am I crazy for thinking that I should be getting better performance, or is something going wrong? Is the fact that I'm running at 1280 x 1024 the main reason that my performance is lagging? (That would be surprising, given how many people run at 1600 x 1200...) Is there a huge difference between benchmarks and in-game performance?
HARDWARE: I have three case fans, but no special cooling on the card itself -- do you think that I have a possible overheating problem? Could any of the symptoms be related to getting a defective card, or would it simply fail to work if it were not quite right out of the box? Would heat or a bad card affect framerates?
SOFTWARE: Do I have any symptoms of driver update issues? Could poor performance be a configuration issue with the drivers or the games? What does "application preference" mean with respect to UT2k4's "Holy Shit!" settings, since there is no in-game AA/AF selection?
Thanks for any ideas you may have...