q2/3 fps seems to be limited on g400/celeron

[galac]

machine: celeron 550 (5,5*100),64mb, g400/16MB, w98s2, drivers 5.30.

my quake 2/3 fps seems to limited. in quake2 ~65fps at all ! resolutions below 1024. the same in quake 3(16bit/all settings tested)- about ~ 35fps. whats wrong. something with vsync ? - but its diabled.
p.s. greatful fps in ut-demo (v.348)

[Kruzin]

What kind of celeron is it really?
I know it's not a Celeron 550.
Is this a cacheless 300?

[galac]

its a celeron 366 overclocked to 550 mhz

[Kruzin]

So it's not a celeronA?
If not, there's you're answer. Cacheless celerons just don't have the juice for hi-fps gaming with the G400...get a celeronA, or better a P3. Even the little bit of cache they put on the celA makes a huge difference...

[galac]

sorry kruzin,
its a celeron with 128kb cache. there were only two celeries without cache. the celeron 266 and the 300 (not A). all later celeron have 128kb full speed cache.

[Snake-Eyes]

The description of the symptoms makes it sound as if the games are processor limited (hence the same FPS regardless of resolution, to a point). At higher resolutions, the games finally become accelerator limited. The only problem with this scenario that I can see is that I believe that others with the same processor you're using have had better results (some by a larger margin than others), which makes me wonder if that is the problem.

If anyone else with o.c. 366 or 550 Celerons could post their experiences, it might help to at least let us know if the problem is the games becoming processor limited or if you need to look deeper.

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Ace

[LAMFDTK]

You are getting what you should with your rig. How much more do you think you should be getting? P3-500 levels? 128 meg levels? You FPS look to me like they are right where they should be. You have a 40 dollar processor with 64 meg, what do you think you should be getting?

[Rohde]

I don't think Galac is processor limited. I don't know if he made a simple timerefresh or a timedemo, but I just made a fast timerefresh in the spot where the game starts of and I got 70 FPS (640x480, 16 bit textures, full texture quality). This is on my K6-2/333, 64 Mb, G400 16 Mb all mounted in the crappiest Motherboard on the market, so Galac should be getting better scores then me

Have you tried using reghacks to be absolutely 100 % sure that VSync is off.


Torben

[Thomaspo]

Interesting results, I have a similar system Celery @ 550 G400 16Mb @ 140/186 (default is 125/166), and an SBlive, 5.30 druivers, NO beta ICD

Q2 ~77 in 640 and 800
~63 1024
~51 1152

Maybe the overclocking has made beeter fps, but surely not by 10 (!) FPS.

Chris

[galac]

thanks for your help.

i only replaced the normal icd.dll of the 5.30 drivers with the beta icd. powerful. q2 timedemo 1 800 82fps, 1024 68fps
q3 demo1 800 46fps, 1024 42fps (16bit, settings all to max. g400/16mb overclocked to 155/155.

[Rohde]

Galac, if I understand you correctly you have your memoryclockspeed at 155 MHz. Either it's some kind of trick in MatroxTweak that I haven't heard of or you have set it seriously wrong.

The default memory clockspeed of the G400 vanilla is 168 MHz, so clocking it to 155 seems a bit catious

Try setting your memory to around 200 MHz (add cooling) this might help on the performance.

If the 155/155 was just a typo, then please just ignore this post


Torben

[galac]

i used the mga tweak 112b. on the left side is the main generator pll. in my normal g400 it is clocked to 252 mhz. on the right side are the dividers for memory and core. i set the main generator clock to 155 mhz and used the dividers 1 for core, memory and the last topic(i dont know how its called). thats all. i seems to work, because the results in fps in q2/3 are higher than before. i cant reply the results now(to verify it), cause i am on work. excuse my english.

[galac]

hi maggi,

thanks for your overclock-recommendation. i think a year ago, i read an overclocking guide for tnt-cards at tomshardware. it shows that on a tnt it is much more efficient to o/c the core and not the memory. yesterday my first strategy to o/c was the same as you explained. at 145/~180 i saw some flickering on my monitor, i think in my case the memory is the problem. so i o/c with a lower memory speed.
when i come back from work - i will do some benchmarks with different clock-settings.

p.s. i use a normal 586 fan to cool my g400.

galac

[Maggi]

Hi galac,

to bring it down to one point:

Yes, your CPU is holding you back from higher FPS.

You'll see similar results in each benchmark you throw at your system:
Almost identical results from 640x480x16bpp up to 1024x768x32bpp. Only at higher resolutions you'll notice a drop in performance, because your Celery simply cannot push the G400 any further.

...

About your OCing settings, I'd say that you didn't choose the best settings, using a low PLL and 1/1 dividers for core, memory and warp engine. Your memory should easily handle frequencies beyond 166MHz stock clock.
My two Vanilla both easily pass the 200MHz barrier without any problems, hence I'd recommend using dividers like 2.25/2/2.25 and a PLL of 250MHz to start from. Increase your PLL in 5MHz steps and check thoroughly if it's stable a clean.

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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")