Why is my 9600 so slow? Or is it?

[ElectricGrandpa]

Hey guys,

I posted here a few weeks ago asking what I should upgrade my crappy geforce2 mx400 to, and it was recommended that I get a radeon 9600(because it's in my price range).

...I bought one, just a normal sapphire radeon 9600 128, because I got a fairly good price for it and stuff.

The problem is that I really don't see a difference in *any* of my games, no difference at all, most of the time, as far as I can tell...

my 3dmark03 score is around 2350, and 3dmark2001 is at 6682... my computer is a p4 1.7, 512mb SDRam...

All I really want to be able to do is just play Counter Strike and DOD without the framerate constantly dropping below 20 and 10 fps at 640x480. I'm pretty sure this card should at least be able to give me a solid 30+ fps...

But there are some oddities too...

If I put the resolution up in games to 800x600 or 024x768, the framerate usually only drops by a few frames per second... Surely raising the resolution that much should make a bigger hit on the framerate?

So basically my question is this : Is it my computer's fault, or the graphics card's? Surely this is abnormal in some way, I expected at least a bit of a performance boost because of this new card!

Ok I'm kinda rambling, so please help, thanks guys!

-EG

 

[Crashman]

I think you're CPU limitted, as the rise in resolution should impart a larger decrease in performance if it were a card issue. Having said that, the 9600 is a fairly slow card, 2/3 the speed of the 9600 Pro, but still nearly twice as fast as the 9600SE.

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