ATI Mobility Radeon 3870 Crossfire. bad performance and low 3d mark

az9214

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Mar 21, 2010
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Hello all

I recently bought an ASI IQ17 D2 with a T9300 processor,Mobility HD 3870 in crossfirez, 4 gb 1066 mhz ram. I am getting reallyly bad performance (<25 FPS) on most of the games (Fallout 3, Risen, Dirt 2, Borderlands) i play even on medium to low settings and low resolutions (1280 X 1024, 1400 X 1050) with AA turned off. I ran 3dmark06 and 3dmark vantage to check the scores my build is getting and even they are very low (4033 and 1375 respectively). The crossfire setup seems to be working as the crossfire icon is displaying for the games i am playing and i am getting a windows experience index gaming score of 7.0 (decent?). As i know very little about graphics cards and gaming performance in general, I would like to ask the people here if the performance is normal for a laptop with my specs or if I am not getting the performance i should be due to some sort of error. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you



Edit: laptop running windows 7 ultimate 64 bit
 
Solution
I don't think it should amount to that much. You also have to remember that if you have anything running like antivirus, windows update, etc, those take away from CPU cycles.

You should also make sure your laptop is running at the maximum performance level. This means switching from power saving to max performance (turning off screen savers, power saving modes, etc).

The other thing I would look at is getting the latest drivers for your devices in your laptop.

isamuelson

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Check out this article on Tom's Hardware. They say that this laptop (with 3870 X2 installation) will have a hard time rivaling desktops that have X2 3870's installed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mobility-radeon-3870,2435.html

Also, they are saying that having X2 3870's is about the same as having one 4870.

However, Fallout 3 isn't Crysis yet in their tests, Crysis was getting the same FPS as what you are reporting at the higher settings. Lowering the details did allow Crysis to get around 42 fps at 1280x1024.

You did install the latest drivers from ATI? That might also help.

The one thing you have to realize is you are running on a laptop. They are usually NOT very conducive to gaming, especially with games that require some mid to high-end graphics cards to play.

You're probably also being bound by your CPU as well. Another thing is, mobility radeons do not perform as well as the desktop versions. So, even though it's an X2 3870, it doesn't measure up to a regular PCIx 3870 X2 setup.
 

az9214

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Mar 21, 2010
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Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I am aware that the mobile gpu's do not match up to the desktop gpu's. However, I believe that my GPU is performing worse than it should compared to other similar builds. For example here is the 3dmark vantage score of a laptop (same model and build as mine) with a p9500 processor.

http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=1205112&compareResultType=19

The laptop in the link above received 6000+ in 3d vantage scores while mine received a 1000. The only differences b/w the above build and mine are the processor (p9500 vs T9300, 2.73 vs 2.5 ghz) and the operating system (vista 64 vs 7 ultimate). So, do you think that the minor processor difference accounts for the large discrepancy in 3d mark scores?
 

isamuelson

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I don't think it should amount to that much. You also have to remember that if you have anything running like antivirus, windows update, etc, those take away from CPU cycles.

You should also make sure your laptop is running at the maximum performance level. This means switching from power saving to max performance (turning off screen savers, power saving modes, etc).

The other thing I would look at is getting the latest drivers for your devices in your laptop.
 
Solution

az9214

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Mar 21, 2010
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I fixed it. It seems that that there are no proper Mobility Radeon drivers available with ATI for windows 7 ultimate. I just installed Windows Vista 64, modded a desktop catalyst driver and installed it. Now the games that were unplayable before run in high settings at resolutions close to 1920 X 1200 and the 3d mark vantage score shot upto 6725. Thanks for the tip, isamuelson.