Performance Issue

[ZerO]

I was wondering if anyone could help me out here. I upgraded from a GeForce3 ti500 to a Radeon 9800xt 256mb card awhile ago and I dunno if I'm getting the best performance. I tried e-mailin ati but they only replied to me once and said to look through the faq on their website which I already tried. In Aquamark3 I got 38097 points and I noticed that in the VGA charts part 3 article on this website that the score for the radeon 9800xt was 46692. I know that their using a faster processor(p4 3.2ghz) but my processor is a p4 2.8ghz so I don't expect a real big difference. Also in games like planetside, halo, and ut2004 I get low fps sometimes. In planetside I run the game at 1280x1024 with everything maxed and with no AA or AF and it runs fine expect in the large battles my fps into the 20s. In Halo I run the game at 1280x1024, all details maxed, no AA or AF and it falls into the 20s in some parts of the game, usually when fights break out. I tried lowering the resolution to 1024x768 and it seems to help somewhat but still sometimes it falls into the 20s. And in ut2004 I notice getting bad fps in the assault mode, with AA and AF off, and I'm running the game at 1280x1024 all details maxed. Is this about normal for my high-end system or should I be getting better performance?

Specs:
Radeon 9800xt 256mb
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
1gb of Ram
Creative Audigy Gamer soundcard
Cable modem
Windows xp

 

[Nights_L]

Try a fresh Windows installation..

 

[Slava]

Correct. Actually, the best thing to do would be to back up user files, format the hard drive and install OS and everything else from scratch. Your Aquamark score is way too low. It should be 45000+

At the very least you should remove all traces of ATI and NVIDA drivers using a driver cleaner or edit registry manually and then select VGA as display adapter in Device Manager, reboot and run the latest Catalyst *.exe

Still, you are unlikely to see a major Halo fps improvement, but most other games will work noticeably better.

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-good one every year?</font color=green>

 

[ZerO]

when I first installed the Radeon 9800xt about 2 months ago I did a fresh install of windows and formatted the harddrive. I was having problems with the videocard(I think it was becouse of the nvidia drivers)and I ended up reinstalling everything. You think I should still try a fresh install?

 

[Slava]

Hmmm.. probably not... mmm ... eerrr... a silly question: do you run anything else at the the same time as Aquamark3? Like do you have antivirus or anything else in your system tray? How many XP processes are Running? Are you running too much unnecessary stuff? That would mess up your benchmarks for sure. If so, download the free version of Sandra 2004 and run performance tune up wizard. That will tell you what services you have running that XP does not need. Set those services to Manual start up mode via service properties. Also Run msconfig command and under the Start up tab see if you have anything you don't need. Like Winamp and Quicktime like to load all sorts of useless crap. Uncheck everything except those things you know for sure you need. Don't forget to reboot

What else ... hmmmm... I dunno, dude, it is hard to tell not sitting in front of the machine. Check you have everything set up right in the BIOS.

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[ZerO]

I went into msconfig and I had about 8 other programs running so took all of them off expect for Zone Alarm, MSN Messenger, and the ATI Icon, then rebooted and ran aquamark3. I guess I got a little bit of an improvement, my score was 38405 this time, but still pretty low.

Also I downloaded sandra 2004 and I ran the performance tune up wizard and it came up with alot of tips and notices. Like it said large memory sizes should be made of registered/buffered memory or ECC/Parity memory and it also said my MPS 1.4 or later is recommended for MP systems. It also said SMBIOS/DMI information may be inaccurate, and alot of other things. I'll have to look into this later as right now I have to go to class, but most of the stuff I have no idea what it is.

 

[Slava]

Zone Alarm is THE FIRST thing you need to KILL KILL KILL once and for ALL TIME. MSN Messenger (unless you REALLY need it at all times.. you can manually load it at any time by the way, just make it not to load at Windows start up) should be DEAD DEAD DEAD! :lol: No, man, I am dead serious. Zone Alarm is one of the worst things you can possibly do to your PC. If you want a firewall get a $30 Linksys router....... Finally, you don't need that ATI icon in your tray. You can get to your card settings via Desktop Properties.

And, one more time: get Sandra 2004 SP-1. It is free. Run Performance tune up wizard and set all the services that it says are not needed to Manual start up type. To do this go to Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Services. Then right-click on the service > Properties > and change Start up Type to Maual > Apply. Repeat with all the services that Sandra says you don't need under XP.

Last but not least, check if you have AA and AF enabled in the card DRIVER. They should both be set to Off or Application Controlled. You can always enable Antialiasing and Aniso from within the game grphics preferences. They DON'T need to be enabled in the driver. Aquamark3 and 3DMark should run at their default settings. Example: If you have 4x Aniso enabled in the driver Aquamark3 enables it AGAIN cuz it is its default setting. This will totally mess up your score..........

Oh, and make sure you DISABLE SYSTEM RESTORE! (and never enable it again).

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[ZerO]

I uninstalled Zone Alarm(I already have a Lynksys router so I guess I don't even need it) and I disabled msn messenger at startup. I disabled the ATI icon but for some reason when I go to display properties then advanced to enable/disable AA or AF the ATI icon automatically loads back up in my system tray.

You said that you don't need to enable AA or AF in the card driver, but I don't know how to enable it in any ofmy games expect for aquamark3. All my other games don't have options to turn it on expect for Anisotropic filtering.

I downloaded Sandra 2004 but when I run the performance tune-up wizard it just comes up with tips, warnings, or notices. I don't see where it lists the programs I don't need.

Anyway, I ran aquamark3 again, this time with nothing in my system tray, and with both AA and AF set to application controlled, and I only got a slightly higher score, 38579. I'm running the measurement in aquamark3 at the default settings, 1024x768x32, no AA, 4xAF, Detail level very high.

 

[Slava]

I downloaded Sandra 2004 but when I run the performance tune-up wizard it just comes up with tips, warnings, or notices. I don't see where it lists the programs I don't need.

It does not *list* anything. The tips at the bottom of the report will say something like "Tip XX: TCPSEC service can be disabled under Windows XP Pro." Pay attention, bro. Read the [-peep-] carefully. If I say it is there, TRUST ME – it IS there. Right there in the performance tune up wizard report.

So go ahead and set unnecessary services to manual the way I explained earlier. The difference between Auto, Manual and Disabled is as follows:

<font color=red>Auto</font color=red> - Service always loads when Windows starts
<font color=red>Manual</font color=red> - Windows will load the service only if the active application requires it
<font color=red>Disabled</font color=red> - Service will NEVER load but this is a dangerous setting because many services depend on the availability of other services and once Service A is disabled this may prevent a good dozen of other essential services from working. Only experienced professionals who know all service dependencies should disable services and only for troubleshooting purposes.

I'm running the measurement in aquamark3 at the default settings, 1024x768x32, no AA, 4xAF, Detail level very high.

That’s right you should run the default Aquamark3 test.

- if you disable ATI icon in msconfig but the box next to “show ATI icon in system tray” in ATI driver is checked this may override the msconfig setting.

You said that you don't need to enable AA or AF in the card driver

Yes I said that and you must disable AA and AF in the driver UNLESS you are about to play a game that DOES NOT support AA and AF. In this case enable them in the driver, play the game and disable them again after you are done wiht this particular game....

but I don't know how to enable it in any ofmy games

NOW, THIS is VERY strange. . . weird even. Every game has a graphics options screen what games are you playing anyway??? Have you looked at the games’ user manuals?

Damn! You are trying to help ppl but they want everything on a silver platter and don’t even TRY to apply any independent effort based on your guidance. Will this ever change?


<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[Slava]

Anyhow, point is that you now know where your performance problem lies: Every time you did something I suggested you got some performance improvement. In other words, continue tweaking and streamlining your system.

- is your paging file "managed by Windows" or you have it set to a fixed size? (hint: it should be FIXED size, i.e. Min and Max are the same and equal to 2.5 times the size of your physical RAM)

- when was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?

- have you disabled System Restore as I recommended earlier?

- have you installed essential Windows updates?

- are you using the latest final release Catalyst driver?

- what are you AGP settings in the BIOS? Are fast writes enabled? Is your AGP apperture set to at least the same size as your VRAM? (well, the last one actually depends on how much system RAM you got)............

etc.. etc...

..... there are many things you can do to improve performance of your PC. Read up on them.

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[Slava]

and make sure you disable V-Sync in the driver before you run Aquamark3

Details here:

<A HREF="http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=394656#394656" target="_new">http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=394656#394656</A>

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[Willamette_sucks]

System restore has saved my ass a few times. It's good to have at least one good restore point, it's well worth the HD space (that's ALL it costs).


As for the performance issue, I'm not sure what the problem could be, as the 9800 XT kicks ass and is infinitely better than your Ti500, and should run all those games fine at the settings you've mentioned. One possibility is that you're a dumbass.

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too
Rachel: why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?

 

[Slava]

System restore has saved my ass a few times <....>
As for the performance issue <....> One possibility is that you're a dumbass.

Lol :lol: no offense, brother, but only a dumbass would ever need system restore to save his ... eeerrmmm ... dumbass. System restore is a total waste or OS resources and it does take more than just hard drive space...


<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[ZerO]

Ok, I set all of the programs that the tune-up wizard said I could disable to manual. I disabled the ATI icon that was overriding the msconfig thing. And the games I play are mostly all fps(Battlefield 1942, Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Halo, Quake 3 Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, all the Unreal Tournament games, Planetside, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Tribes2). So I play alot of fps's. Only some of them have the option to turn Anisotropic filtering on, but none of them have where you can enable Anti-Aliasing in the game.

I havn't defragmented my harddrive since I did a clean install of everything 2 months ago, so I'm doing that right now, but its going to take all day at the rate its going. I'm using the latest catalyst drivers, I disabled system restore(But I'm thinking if something gos wrong I'm going to need this), I install all the automatic updates from windows. I checked under smartgart under display/advanced and I have my agp set to 8x and it won't let me enable fast writes under smart garts(I'll just have to go into my bios after my disk is done defragmenting). I have 1gb of Ram so what should my agp apperture size be? I don't know what the paging file is or how to change it to fixed. And I have under direct3d my v-sync is set to application preference(should have this on or off, couse I've heard if you fps gos higher than your refresh rate it can couse tearing, or does v-sync slow down your system?).

To the guy whos calling me a dumbass, I don't know hardly anything about computers. All I use this computer for is playing games and surfing the internet. I'm not like you guys who know computers inside and out, thats why I posted here for help.

 

[ZerO]

I change my AGP aperture size to 256, enabled fast writes, did most of the other stuff you said to(expect changing the paging file to fixed, I'm not sure how to do this), and when I was defragmenting my harddrive my computer froze up. So everything I did expect for those two things my score in aquamark3 is now 38624.

Also, shouldn't my system run right without having to tweak all these things? I mean, all you really need is just the correct drivers for your video card, sound card, and agp driver and all the latest patches for your games? And I've tweaked my system and its brought up my score but only by 600 points, when I should be getting 45000+ like the article got.

 

[Slava]

I will reply later. There's more you need to do. The fact that the system froze is suspicious. We'll talk later. Come check this thread tomorrow. By the way have you disabled V-sync (to run Aquamark3) like I suggested? If not, do so cuz all else equal V-sync cuts your FPS in half...

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>

 

[Willamette_sucks]

Slava, show me documentation that states it takes anything more than HD space. The only time it would use anything else is the time it creates the save point, which is not a constant thing.

Also your claim that only a dumbass would need it, is false, as proven by my needing it, and some of my other non-dumbass friends. Unexpected things happen, and also, those of us who like to play/tweak around can sometimes mess things up when experimenting. Not too long ago I had to reinstall Windows because I jacked with alot of registry settings, from which my system could not recover without a reinstall.
Not all of the registry settings I messed with had commonly available documentation (i.e., not just your casual windowz 'tweaker' settings).

BTW to the guy with the perf. problem. Set your AGP aperature size to 128. This number is not neccessarily supposed to be the same as the amount of RAM on your card. Setting the AGP aperature size sets the maximum amount of allocatable system memory for use by the graphics card (for texture data etc. that cannot fit on the video cards ram). You will never use this space for texture data (or anything, besides a couple tables [like a windows page file, some space must always be allocated and some memory is always used] for quite some time, as you have a 256mb card).

I'm not sure why, but tests have shown 128 to offer the best performance (although the differences are small).

Me: are you saying I can't provide?
Me: cause I know I can provide.
Me: oh and I can provide money too
Rachel: why do we need money when we can just stay in our room and have sex all day?

 

[ZerO]

I tried defragmenting my hard drive, I left it to defrag while I was at work and just got back and it said it completed it this time. I ran aquamark3, once with vsync at application preference and then another time with vsync off. The first time I got 38579 again and the second I got little bit of a lower score (I dunno why) I got 34414 points. I also notice the damn msn messenger and ctfmon.exe keeps on getting checked to load at startup, after I check it off under msconfig for some reason it gets checked back on again. But the funny thing is msn messenger and some other things where running under my processes list in windows task manager when I ran the first test and the second time I disabled them all expect for explorer and got a slightly lower score.

alright, well get back to me tommorrow, and thanks a ton for helping me out so much

 

[Slava]

OK, I am back. Been Playing FarCry like a geek with a gun all weekend. Could not stop. Now that I am back at work and the networks are behaving well, I have nothing to do, so here’s my helping hand once again.

I have read the new posts above. At this point I am not sure exactly what causes your performance problems. See a couple more suggestions below.

A few comments first:

1. It is very weird that turning V-Sync OFF resulted in a LOWER Aquamark score. Are you positive about this? V-sync always leads to some reduction of frame rate. Without getting technical, every game I know that has V-Sync ON/OFF option in graphics settings warns that this option “improves the visual experience but results in slower performance.” That said, I have NO idea what is going on with your system if it is a fact that with V-Sync OFF you get a lower score. I suspect you are doing something wrong, but at this point I cannot really help you with that. Re-read everything and re-try everything again.

2. Some of the suggestions I offer are NOT directly linked to video benchmarks, but overall system performance boost is always a good thing and every little bit helps.

3. Messenger. Start it up and choose NOT to load the messenger when Windows starts. Windows is stupid this way and sometimes there are multiple settings for the same thing and they override one another if not set to the same value.

4. Defrag locking up IS scary.

First, is your page file FIXED SIZE? Do this: R-click My Computer => Advanced => Performance Options => Virtual Memory (Change) => In the fields entitled “Initial Size” and “Maximum Size” enter the same number which is equal to the amount of your system RAM times 2.5. Well, you have one Gig of ram so maybe 2.5 gigs will be an overkill. So I suggest you enter 2000 for both fields. It is in megabytes, so you gotta enter 2000Mb=2Gb,

Second, do you have enough free disk space? If the system is low on space and Windows manages your paging file (virtual memory) this will very seriously hurt performance. Since your Defrag crashed it is possible that there is not enough hard disk space. Defrag requires that at least 15% of space is free on the hard drive. If this is the case, DELETE SOME PORN :lol:

Third, since Defrag crashed it is possible that you have physical problem on the drive, like damage, you know? Bad sectors in particular. Do this:

Double-click My Computer =>
R-click hard drive C: =>
Properties =>
Tools =>
Error Checking (Check now) =>
there are two options: “Automatically fix file system errors” and “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. Check BOTH of these options and click Start =>

XP says that it needs exclusive access to the hard drive and offers to run checkdisk “the next time Windows starts”. By all means agree to this and reboot. Do this before going to bed because this may take a long time. Once rebooted the system will display a blue screen with Windows logo, inform you that checkdisk was scheduled, give you the option to cancel and if you don’t cancel it will begin after a few seconds. Let it finish. If it CRASHES you need a new hard drive.

Fourth, what is your motherboard’s AGP BUS? Is it 4x or 8x? If you are running your 8x video card on the 4x AGP this effectively halves the bandwidth your card is able to support. This usually is not noticeable UNTIL you run Aquamark3 or FarCry .

6. Do you have viruses on your computer? Get the latest virus definition files for your antivirus and run it with “Scan ALL files” option ON.

7. Do you have tons of Spyware on your PC (programs that some websites stealthily install on your PC without your knowledge or that come as part of some “cool stuff” you downloaded and installed, like a screensaver)? Get a FREE copy of Ad-Aware 6.0 from <A HREF="http://www.lavasoft.com" target="_new">http://www.lavasoft.com</A>. Install it, check for and install Updates for reference files and run a complete system scan. In Customize options choose NOT to quarantine bad files and once the scan is complete check all check boxes for ALL of the items and choose Continue. All the bad stuff will be removed. This is safe. I have yet to see Ad-Aware 6.0 make a single mistake and propose that you delete something good. Of course, as with all the other programs, in settings choose NOT to load Ad-Aware 6.0 when Windows starts and don’t enable the Start-up scan.

Hmmm.. what else… I have no idea what else to suggest. I am done here. Dude, if none of this helps, well, pay my roundtrip airfare, get a case of Sam Adams, invite a bunch of hot chicks and I will fly in to take care of the matter PERSONALLY

See ya.

<font color=green>Stingy people end up paying double. One kick-ass rig that will go strong for three years or one half-decent one every year?</font color=green>