4650 slower than 4550!!

[giouralis]

I was trying to do a small upgrade on my PC which is in a slimline box (so low profile cards) and has a 270W PSU.
I had a Diamond 4550 with 512Mb GDDR3. I decided to get something better and the only thing I could find that would fit in the box and be within reach of my PSU was an ASUS EAH4650 512 MB DDR2 .
In ALL articles I could find the 4650 DDR2 is said to be clearly faster than a 4550 DDR3.
In my PC though it is CONSISTENTLY slower. I am running windows 7 and installed Catalyst 9.10 for both cards.
I ran the windows experience index, PC wizard benchmarks, Resident evil 5 bench and in ALL of them the 4650 is SLOWER than the 4550. EG in a 1360x768 all high AAx2 RE5 fixed bench the 4550 does 18.9 FPS and the 4650 only 14.5FPS!
I would really welcome any suggestions, cause no matter the little money spent on the 4650 it SHOULD be faster than the 4550.
Thanks

 

[Kari]

make sure the clocks are right, take a look in the CCC or download GPU-Z

 

[giouralis]

make sure the clocks are right, take a look in the CCC or download GPU-Z

Clocks are OK I think. 4550 is 600 GPU 750 mem and 4650 is 600 gpu 400 mem. I even overclocked the 4650 with ccc to 750/500 and was still a little slower than the 4550.

 

[b82]

In ALL articles I could find the 4650 DDR2 is said to be clearly faster than a 4550 DDR3.

This may well be a typo, but the 4550 is available with a range of memory types. You have the GDDR3, not the DDR3 (or so you said at the beginning). GDDR and DDR are not the same.

Not sure if this would make enough difference to explain it, probably a typo anyway.

 

[jay2tall]

1) The old card had DDR3 memory your new card has DDR2.... IE, it is slower.
2) I believe the 4650 requirements are a 400W PSU. It could be underpowered.

 

[giouralis]

This may well be a typo, but the 4550 is available with a range of memory types. You have the GDDR3, not the DDR3 (or so you said at the beginning). GDDR and DDR are not the same.

Not sure if this would make enough difference to explain it, probably a typo anyway.

It is a typo. The 4550 card is GDDR3. I thought that memory might make a difference but then in a test here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gt-220,2445.html the exact 4550 card that I have is tested against a 4650 DDR2 and the 4650 is way better.

 

[Kari]

the memory on the 4650 looks awfully slow... and it's ddr2 vs gddr3 as said before

i dont think it's a power problem, those cards just sip it a little

edit that toms article actually uses ddr2 versions for both cards
Sapphire Radeon 4650
600 MHz Core, 500 MHz Memory, 512MB DDR2
Diamond Radeon 4550
600 MHz Core, 750 MHz Memory, 512MB DDR2

 

[b82]

2) I believe the 4650 requirements are a 400W PSU. It could be underpowered.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-4000/hd-4600/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-4600-system-requirements.aspx
That is indeed what the manufacturer says. However here:
http://www.gpureview.com/Radeon-HD-4650-PCI-E-card-580.html
max power draw is quoted as 48W. The GPU manufacturers ALWAYS err well on the side of caution when making power recommendations. The overall system requirements depend on the rest of the system. If you look at the recent review of the Radeon HD 5770 (much more powerful) it doesn't push a quad core system much above 200W at max load. Ignore the crossfire.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-hd-5770,review-31704-15.html
Yours should be less.

 

[giouralis]

the memory on the 4650 looks awfully slow... and it's ddr2 vs gddr3 as said before

i dont think it's a power problem, those cards just sip it a little

edit that toms article actually uses ddr2 versions for both cards
Sapphire Radeon 4650
600 MHz Core, 500 MHz Memory, 512MB DDR2
Diamond Radeon 4550
600 MHz Core, 750 MHz Memory, 512MB DDR2

The diamond on the test is this http://www.diamondmm.com/4550PE3512HS.php which is GDDR3. Diamond do not make 4550 cards ohter than GDDR3.

BUT one more comment about memory.
I observed in CCC that the 4550 is reported as 512Mb, GDDR3, 12.8Gb/s.
The 4650 is reported as 2048Mb or HyperMemory and that's all.
Is it using RAM for graphics?? and why would it do that on the 4650??

 

[b82]

BUT one more comment about memory.
I observed in CCC that the 4550 is reported as 512Mb, GDDR3, 12.8Gb/s.
The 4650 is reported as 2048Mb or HyperMemory and that's all.
Is it using RAM for graphics?? and why would it do that on the 4650??

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/ati-hyper-memory/Pages/ati-hyper-memory.aspx

Bingo. We're getting somewhere. Yes, for some reason it seems it is reserving ordinary RAM on the mainboard for graphics. But I don't know why that would be happening.

Edit: Actually after reading about HyperMemory more carefully, it seems it might be a technology to allow the GPU to use BOTH graphics AND onboard memory. I'm not sure about this.

 

[Kari]

ok so toms has messed things up again in their reviews. lol

but that hypermemory sounds bad... I don't have any ideas why it would say that. Are there some settings in CCC about memory management or some such??

 

[b82]

Yeah, can you turn off 'HyperMemory' in the 4650 settings and then see how it performs?

 

[EXT64]

Try running dxdiag (just type that into the run or search command) and see what ram it lists under the graphics tab. My 4650 DDR3 lists 512MB. You could try uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers too.

 

[giouralis]

The dxdiag reports 2042Mb as Approx. Total Memory on the Display tab.

I read the AMD article and the only thing it does not say is how to DISABLE this. Any mem sharing sounds realy bad to me...

 

[b82]

I think you'll find this might help you turn it off:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=66618

If you manage to do this, then why not run DXdiag again afterwards?

 

[EXT64]

That is unsettling, as it certainly sounds like it is sharing memory (which would slow it down tremendously.

As for disabling it, I saw someone say that ATI tray tools could disable it, but that was years ago so I don't know if it still works.

edit: b82's article is the one I was referring to

 

[b82]

Yeah, I just read it more thoroughly too. Later down that forum the evidence comes in in favour of leaving Hyper Memory ON.

I think you should get it turned OFF while we troubleshoot the use of Graphics RAM, then once we've sorted that out, consider turning the HyperMemory back on.

The correct drivers are definitely installed? 64 bit or 32 bit?

 

[hardwaretechy]

Run Gpu-z and report both the core speed, memory speed, RAM, and bandwidth --- basically the specs that your 4650 is showing.

The fact that you said 400Mhz earlier for memory speed doesn't seem right, i am curious of the bandwidth. If the system is simply not reading your card right that could be the problem, or the card itself is bad. Check on the retail box (or from wherever you bought it) that the clocks are as advertised as well (this will give you a potential reason to RMA).

 

[giouralis]

The drivers are good 32bit latest CCC (9.10).

I think in CCC to disable this HyperMem is hidden under some other name...

As for the advertised vs actual clocks they are correct i.e. as advertised by ASUS and reported by CPUZ. I thought of the bad card thing but it seems to be the mem sharing or some mem related issue.
I am looking in CCC now to disable this.

 

[b82]

Look for "Enable/Disable ATT Shared Memory" or similar name.

 

[nforce4max]

Get your money back if you can and look for a DDR3 variant.

 

[EXT64]

Download GPU-Z and see what that says too. I think in Win7, CPU-Z reports the correct frequency, which should downclock to very low levels when not in use. You could try driver 9.9 or 9.8 also (doing a reinstall of the drivers rarely hurts).

 

[brockh]

I think we're making this too complicated... The memory is slower which would explain the performance disparity. Return the card and find a GDDR3 variant. The shared memory isn't affecting anything.

 

[giouralis]

People w/ DDR3 variants have similar issues with shared mem. They do not have performance comparisons so they may well be seeing lower performance than what is expected of these cards.
As said in all tests a 4650 DDR2 always comes out faster than a 4550 GDDR3. If it were any other way I would not have bought this card and I would not be talking about this issue.

But from my experience if you come up to something like this you either spend a few days figuring it out and learning a lot OR you 've made a very bad choice... I am hoping for the first!

 

[nforce4max]

Don't use shared mem since it creates more over heard for the cpu since if any thing wants to get to the system ram it first has to go to the cpu. Turn off shred mem. Hypermemory sucks period no matter what budget or use.