3DMark 99

[J1NG]

Remember that old thing? Yeah, well, since it would only run on Win98, and I can only play USAF and some other classic games on a Win98 machine, well, I set up one rig purely for Win98 game play.

Thing is, I had a replacement X850XT PE card turn up. Well, I threw it into the Win98 rig, and was expecting super scores. Actually, it seemed rather bland. Didn't seem very super for this system. Is this normal?

Windows 98SE
Pentium 4 1.8Ghz 400Mhz FSB 512k cache
512MB DDR2100 RAM
8GB HD ATA 66
CAT 5.9 Drivers
X850XT PE 256MB AGP

Scores: 11372 3DMarks, 24096 CPU 3DMarks, 37782 3D Raster Marks, 131.1FPS Race, 100FPS Shooter.

Will put some piccies up later if wanted.

The other 3DMark systesm seems OK though.

J1NG

[schmosef]

I'd guess that the driver isn't optimized for the version of DirectX that 3DMark 99 uses.

[J1NG]

Yeah, well, you'd think that being DX9 capable drivers would mean that DX6 would work 100% and then some.

I suppose the drivers bit did say "beta" support. So the card working is already a bit of a miracle.

Anyway, at least I can switch on all those rediculous AA and AF for the old games and get 200+fps.

J1NG

[schmosef]

Yeah, well, you'd think that being DX9 capable drivers would mean that DX6 would work 100% and then some.

That's not how COM works.

If they tweak a particular function handler in DX8 then DX9 would be able to call it but DX7 would not.

So if they found a way to tweak the speed of a particular routine it's up to the driver team to go as far back in the DX library as possilbe to implement it.

I doubt that they did that.

[J1NG]

Right, also being a beta, probably means I'm running everything raw. Hence the crappy scores. Thanks for that. Never bothered with learning about COM.

J1NG

[J1NG]

Just realised I posted this in the Matrox Hardware forum instead of the Benchmarks forum. If any mod wants to move the thread. Feel free to do so.

J1NG