OK folks, where's my bottleneck?

[DarkSyd]

After my little brother brought his PIII 500 over with a Geforce DDR and ripped off 5000+ 3dmarks, I started to feel like I was getting the shaft with 2800 with a G400 and a 933 Coppermine.
So I fixed my Vanilla G400 up purty like with a nice juicy fan and used MGATweak to crank it up to MAX speed. No visual artifacts and seems stable.
3dMarks still at 2800.
I went back to make sure I had hit apply, and minimized MGATweak to the systray, and tried again...same thing.
Am I doing something wrong...or do I have a bottleneck someplace else? I thought these things thrived on fast CPUs....

[ALBPM]

Make sure V-Sync is disabled.

Check to AGP aperature in your system BIOS, this should be set at 128-256.

Are you running at 2X AGP???

Paul

[Joel]

Plus don't expect to get as high of a score with a Matrox card in that benchmark program as you would with a nVidia card, since the benchmark was optimized for the nVidia cards with T&L processing. Turn off the T&L and then compare them.

Joel

[paulcs]

I find 3DMark2000 tends to favor the GeForce2. I really don't think Direct3D games are NVIDIA's strong suit, and yet the GeForce2's 3DMark scores are astronomically high. The G400 Max's scores impress me as being artificially low, particularly when compared to the TNT2 Ultra. I guess this is the problem with synthetic benchmarks.

Realworld D3D benchmarks aren't much better. Expendable is getting old, and it's really not a great indicator. UT, as a D3D benchmark, has all sorts of CPU-related bottlenecks. It scales well with CPU speed, but poorly when increasing resolution and bit-depth, and from card to card. (The GeForce2, for instance, is notorious for mediocre UTBench scores.)

Increasing CPU speed can have an great effect on gaming performance, particularly at low resolutions and bit depths. When you start increasing visual settings, your videoboard becomes more of a factor. At 933 MHz, I think it's going to be a while before your CPU becomes a bottleneck. The G400 is over a year old, and while it's aging well, I think we have to be realistic. I believe, however, that you should worry too much about it's synthetic benchmarks. If it becomes a issue when you're actually gaming, then you have a performance problem.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[DarkSyd]

OK, AGP is at 2x, I'm going to try changing AGP ap from 128 to 256 and see if there is any difference.
I'll have to check the Vsync...not sure about that one.

Paul,
the reason I was thinking about oc'ing the card is because it is a gaming issue, not just a benchmark thing...I have to reduce model and world detail to med in UT to get smooth gameplay at 1024x, and everquest is not happy at 1024x either. If those g800's don't get here soon, I may have to do something drastic

Thanks

James

[DarkSyd]

*sigh*

AGP ap made no difference.
Using the Vsync reg hack made none either.

Some sort of brick wall here...dunno what it is...I can't see how I can be getting the same scores with vanilla and oc'ed speeds.

[Humus]

The reason is that 3dmarks2000 isn't especially fillrate limited. It's way too much geared towards polygon throughput. So upgrading you cpu increases your score more. But the GF will use the T&L unit.

[paulcs]

Did you have the world and skin details jacked up or at their default settings?

The G400 is an old board, and it's just not going to perform like current generation boards. However, the GeForce2, for some bizarre reason, has issues with UT. It's no faster, and sometimes slower, that the GeForce DDR. If UT performance is the be all and end all of your gaming experience, your best bet is probably a Voodoo board.

Having said that, and on reflection, 2800 seems a little slow for a G400 with such a fast CPU. Are you running the default benchmark?

Things like IRQ sharing, driver conflicts, and AGP aperture can negatively impact peformance, by the way.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Helevitia]

I think you should be at least getting 3100/3200 or so. I can hit 3179 @927 and my G400 vanilla clocked to 135/175.

Dave

[DarkSyd]

Helevitia..
I'll look into the IRQ situation...the only other cards I've got tin the system are an SB Live and a NIC, so if there is a problem I'm sure I can find a free IRQ.

And no, UT is not the be all and end all...just somewhat disappointing having to turn the detail down with a 933 cpu. The card may be a year old, but so is the game

I'll muck around with it a bit more today and see what happens.

[MorF]

try powerstrip....it can disable vsync check
for AGP transfer rate and of course o/c your
vid card...anytime I up the speed on my G400
my score increases.Yours should too.
Morf

[Ali]

We probably need more info. Are you using win98 or 2000, do you have the latest drivers, how much RAM do you have.

SB live cards use to cause problems, I never had one myself, but the forums use to be full of issuses with them.

What do you have running in the background?

What version of 3dmarks are you using?

If you have a 933 Coppermine, what motherboard are you using? Are you using a 820 with MTH or something? 600Mhz Rambus. Is busmastering working?

There are a lot of variables to look into, but you should DEFINATELY be getting a higher score than 2800.

Ali

[DarkSyd]

OK...seems MGATweak doesn't like my system...just tried Powerstrip as Morf suggested, and got 3200 at 190/142. I was getting some 2d pixel corruption at 200/150.

This doesn't seem quite so bad...if you have any other suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

The rest of the system details are in the sig...

------------------
Guinea Pig Rig
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Windows2000 Pro, 700e@933 on Asus CUBX, 128MB Micron PC133, Vanilla G400/32 (PD5.06), 15gb Quantum Fireball+ LM, Fujitsu 5.25gb, Pioneer 10x slot load DVD, SB Live! Value, Altec Lansing ACS45.2, Sycom 300va UPS

Server
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Windows NT4 Server SP6a, Cel 366@550 on Asus P2b (1011), 128MB Micron PC133, OEM G400/16, 4.3gb Maxtor HD, Diamond Fireport 40 SCSI, Pioneer 32x SCSI Slot load CDROM, Pioneer 32x Slot load IDE, Yamaha 4416s burner, MX300

Support Staff
-------------
Grey Cat, Orange Cat (still MIA)

...currently working on the world's first C64 based parallel computing project

[DarkSyd]

OK, 3270 at 195/146 using 3dMark2000 1.1.

I think I've oc'd the cpu and vid card enough for one day...time to move on to the modem

Thanks everyone!

James

[kjliew]

You may not have the "Clock Monitoring" enabled on MGATweak. 3DMark will reset the display card on certain machine, and hence nullify any overclocking you have made using MGATweak.