Cause for concern - 3dmark 2000 ?

[aaroncgi]

I finally got around to downloading this thing over the weekend, and it seems pretty darned cool. My searching through the archives has brought me to the conclusion that many of you also have, that benchmarks don't mean much, what's really important is whether or not the games and other software you run, runs well.

What concerns me is a couple things that 3Dmark 2000 reported under my system info. It reports my G400 as having only 16M of memory available (I have 32M), and further reports it as using the PCI bus!

Beyond that, I found that the benchmarking was dog slow in ANY resolution with high detail, I think the BEST FPS I got was 15-20, and I'm using an Athlon 650 with 128M ram! Oh and that's another thing, it did report I have 128M of memory on my system, but said I only have 66M free? Windows doesn't really use THAT much memory, does it? I did a shut down before running 3Dmark 2000, figured that would take care of anything using memory, but no ?

I'm thinking this may have something to do with my VIA AGP driver, which I actually unistalled as it gave me display problems. Time to look into the newer driver? (4.24 was the one giving trouble)

So far, all my games play smooth, either running at 1024 x 768 x 32, or in the case of NFS:HS, 1280 x 960 x 32, details all on high. Diablo II does slow down a bit at times though, which seemed odd to me..

Thanks for your thoughts!

Aaron

Tyan S2380 v 1.02
Athlon 650
PC133 128MB
Matrox G400 32MB DH
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB
Kenwood 42X
Yamaha DS-XG PCI
Zoom 56K PCI
Samsung Syncmaster 950P
Daewoo CMC-1501BA

[Kosh Naranek]

Well I have 320 Mb ram and about 204 Mb Free so yes windoze does use a lot of ram.
Mainly because of its's diskcahe which tends to use a lot of ram....you can use various tools to control this.
As goes for diablo II it does tend 2 slow down once and a while if you haven't done a full install...and if you are playing cd music.
My cpu is a p3 700@980 and I get 23.1 FPS in
3DMark2000 1024x768x16 in Helicopter High Detail and 37.6 FPS in Adventure High Detail.
I don't know why 3DMark only reports 16 MB Ram on your G400.
( I have a G400 Max )

[aaroncgi]

Thanks for the reply Kosh! I guess my system is about where it should be then in terms of FPS, given how much faster yours is both CPU and G400.

As for Diablo II, I tried to do the full install, but there is some kind of conflict between my CD-rom drive and Diablo II. Kenwood is aware of it, and there is a firmware upgrade that should fix it, but it doesn't work, and Kenwood technical support has been unreachable.

Aaron

[Alec]

aaroncgi:

First off, I´d like to tell you that I´ve been sucessful (whatever that means )in the 3D gaming department without giving a flying sh*t about 3DMARK2000 and the likes. Those programs are evil. Numbers don´t mean much in a real gaming environment.

I think that you let Windows take control of too much RAM. When I had 128 Mb (I now have 192), I used to have 92/93 Mb free at startup. You simply have to install this little program (Cacheman):
http://www.outertech.com/english/index.html