G400 faster than 8500?!?

[Jon P. Inghram]

While playing Everquest I've noticed that the framerate in the Bazaar seems to drop down quite a bit lower on our Radeon 8500 compared the good ole G400 MAX that used to be in my system. Turns out the G400 MAX is FASTER than the 8500 when overloaded by non T&L compatable geometry (EQ has a horrible graphics engine.) I put the G400 back in and ran 3dMark2k2 in 640x480x16 to help reduce fill-rate differences. The 8500 was ran with T&L set to software in 3dMark.

Radeon 8500, G400 MAX

3DMark Score
(3D marks) 1876 , 2052

Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail
(FPS) 25.5 , 32.4

Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail
(FPS) 10.5 , 13.2

Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail
(FPS) 23.9 , 24.5

Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail
(FPS) 12.9 , 10.5

Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail
(FPS) 47.4 , 50.6

Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail
(FPS) 22.0 , 25.2

Fill Rate (Single-Texturing)
(MTexels/s) 992.9 , 183.9

Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing)
(MTexels/s) 1897.3 , 200.5

High Polygon Count (1 light)
(MTriangels/s) 2.7 , 2.8

High Polygon Count (8 lights)
(MTriangels/s) 1.6 , 1.8

Environment Bump Mapping
(FPS) 55.3 , 35.0

Vertex Shader
(FPS) 21.7 , 23.6

Point Sprite Speed
(MSprites/s) 6.1 , 1.1

[Chrono_Wanderer]

You forgot Game 4 - Nautre jk

That's a pretty impressive 8500 you have there.

P.S. Did you somehow moved all the rendering onto the CPU? Probably proves ATI drivers are heavy (also buggy) and uses lots of system resources. Once again Matrox proves to the world that they can make drivers

[[GDI]Raptor]

Hehe!

Impresive.... Have to try that with a GeForce4 card too.....

[Jon P. Inghram]

Just hit the change button in the "Display and CPU settings" area and select "D3D Software T&L" for the rendering pipeline. Normally I get 6970 when running at 1.38 GHz.

[Technoid]

Not surpricing finds

[Indiana]

Hmm, your R8500 is too slow. I have benched the R8500 in software-mode some time ago and it was not that slow...
However, ATIs drivers never were easy on the CPU, if they were, I guess NVidia would see no land even with their GF FX vaporware product (that still has not arrived, not even single cards for the major hardware test sites?)

[Jon P. Inghram]

How fast was the processor you used when testing it? Also might be that DX9 and/or Cat3 drivers are less efficient in software mode.

[Indiana]

AthlonXP1800+ @2000+ speeds.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Gee, I wonder why you'd get better software T&L scores with that processor compared to my Celeron 1.2@1.38. And don't forget the RAM, I'm sure you're using DDR which is sometimes considered to be somewhat faster than conventional SDRAM, especially compared to the 115 MHz mine is running at.

[Novdid]

You don't say!