Video Card Tweaks

[Fortune111]

Hi, I know this is a Gforce forum, I am posting for two in one reasons. First I need some help for all you experts. I am new at tweaking video cards. I own a Radeon 8500. I know....ATI....but can some of you give me some recommendations on how to tweak this card. A can't get any help from the ATI guys and with the current settings the way they are and the performance I am thinking of buying the G4 Ti4600 but before I do, first is there any good recommendations for which brand.....gamer here. And of course if I can tweak the 8500 a little bit I may save a little money.

I was looking at the 9700 pro, but the 4600 is half the price and from what I've read so far performs better.

thanks
TH7II-Raid P4-2.4
512 Mem
Radeon 8500
Audigy Platinum
52x Yamaha CD
60gig WD running ata100

[Commish]

When you said you can't get any help from the ATI guys, are you referring to the "other video cards" section on this site?
If you didn't know, you could try Rage3D (http://www.rage3d.com) . There are a few tweak utilities available for download and they have a very active message board.
I used to visit there quite frequently when I had my 8500, I got a lot of good info from there. Hope this helps, good luck.

[Fortune111]

I have always owned ATI. I go to the Rage3d site. It is a very useful site when it comes to using tweak programs. But I can never get any help from anyone there on recommended tweaks. I know about programs, I just don't know about settings.

Seems there are alot of people getting high 3d marks but don't tell anyone how they got them, thats really some of the info I would like to see. My 3d mark for the 8500 is 6700, but I see marks from 8-11000....ok what did you do, what can I do?

Since I didn't seem to get any help, and the reviews are really good on the TI4600 and a friend recommended the card and this site. I may head to the Nvidia side and see what that does for me.

It seems odd for me to ask a question on this forum but my buddy suggested it saying this site helps out more.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Fortune111
My 3d mark for the 8500 is 6700, but I see marks from 8-11000....ok what did you do, what can I do?

3dmark is highly system dependant. people with 5 digit scores probably have top of the line CPUs and have done some major overclocking to achieve those results without a R9700(the 11000).

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by StealthHawk


3dmark is highly system dependant. people with 5 digit scores probably have top of the line CPUs and have done some major overclocking to achieve those results without a R9700(the 11000).

But he said he has a 2.4 GHz P4 so he should be getting at least 9500. So we go through the standard battery of questions: do you have the latest drivers for your motherboard? Latest BIOS? Did you do a clean install of your drivers before benchmarking? Etc.

[Bigus Dickus]

Originally posted by Fortune111
I was looking at the 9700 pro, but the 4600 is half the price and from what I've read so far performs better.

I take it that you mean the 4600 performs better than your 8500... not the 9700, right? :confused:

About your 3dMark score... yes, that seems a bit low. I'm scoring roughly 9500 with an 8500 running stock clock speeds (275/275), a KT333 chipset with an Athlon XP @ 1.85GHz (176FSB).

My chip/fsb/memory is probably pretty close in performance to your P4 2.4. And, I thought P4 systems (especially with RDRAM... is the TH7-II an RDRAM or DDR board?) performed better on 3dMark.

All in all, I'd say there is some driver or other resource conflict going on, or else you have a Crucial brand 8500 running at like 100Mhz :) (j/k).

More info I guess would be needed... is this score after a fresh install? Was there another card in the system before this one (since an OS install)? ATi (you said you used all ATi in the past) or NVIDIA?

[Raptorman]

Use the latest drivers available.

Have you considered overclocking your card? My friend has an 8500 I put in his system, and he got a good performance increase from doing that. Also, have you tweaked your motherboards BIOS at all?

[legion88]

Originally posted by Fortune111
I have always owned ATI. I go to the Rage3d site. It is a very useful site when it comes to using tweak programs. But I can never get any help from anyone there on recommended tweaks. I know about programs, I just don't know about settings.

Seems there are alot of people getting high 3d marks but don't tell anyone how they got them, thats really some of the info I would like to see. My 3d mark for the 8500 is 6700, but I see marks from 8-11000....ok what did you do, what can I do?

Since I didn't seem to get any help, and the reviews are really good on the TI4600 and a friend recommended the card and this site. I may head to the Nvidia side and see what that does for me.

It seems odd for me to ask a question on this forum but my buddy suggested it saying this site helps out more.

Believe it or not, nothing special is done to get scores in the 8 to 11,000 range.

What you have is a real problem, not a tweaking problem. Suggestions to overclock or change game settings won't solve the problem, just hides it.

Do you have a drivers CD for your RIMM-based ABIT motherboard? Did you install those drivers? Windows XP or ME may already have drivers that will work with your motherboard but those won't give you the performance you seek. I'm not too familiar with that board you have (or any i850-based board), though.

I have a SIS-based board. So for me, I had to (1) install the video card drivers and then (2) install the AGP drivers in that order. (Actually, the order of installation is recommended. I never tried it the other way around.)

You can also have wrong settings in the BIOS as well that can hurt performance. That is what happened to me years ago. When running 3DMark2000, the scores were the same regardless of resolution. The same result with Quake3 benchmarks. It was as if VSYNC was permanently on. It turns out that one of the BIOS settings was wrong (external cache was enabled when my CPU doesn't have one). I had one of those SlotA T-Birds Athlons at the time.

So you may want to pursue the possibility that the BIOS settings are wrong.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by saturnotaku


But he said he has a 2.4 GHz P4 so he should be getting at least 9500. So we go through the standard battery of questions: do you have the latest drivers for your motherboard? Latest BIOS? Did you do a clean install of your drivers before benchmarking? Etc.

i overlooked his system specs :o however, there could be many things that lower his score, type of RAM, what variation of a R8500 he's using, as well as things that have already been mentioned(latest drivers/bios)

[ATI LoVeR 9700]

The 8500 is not as fast as a Geforce4 TI4600, but it sure looks prettier. :D

Anyways, the Radeon 9700 is about times faster than the Geforce4 TI4600 on average. When you have full blown anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing, the Radeon 9700 makes the Geforce4 Ti4600 look like a TNT2.

So, to tweak the system you need the latest drivers, the latest bios and so on. Be sure your Bios configuration is ok. Have the AGP aperture set at 64mb.

Don't overclock anything, yet. Tell us what kind of scores you are getting. Be sure you don't have anti-aliasing on, or even anisotropic filtering even though it's about free on the Radeon 8500.

So tell us what kind of scores you have, driver versions, and Bios version. We need to know this stuff to help.

[thcdru2k]

Edit: Sorry, bud we are not getting into this again. Try to stay on topic or don't post at all.

[thcdru2k]

judge for yourself.

geforce 4 vs radeon 8500, iq, morrowind.

geforce4
http://home.pacbell.net/buon/gf4-morro1-1024.jpg

radeon8500
http://home.pacbell.net/buon/rad8500-morro1-1024.jpg

look at the textures on the rocks, and the background trees.

[StealthHawk]

they look pretty similar disregarding color differences to me :confused:

was there supposed to be some prounounced radical difference between them? ie, clarity and such are pretty much on par as far as i can tell. the shots are also at slightly different angles...

[thcdru2k]

my bad..didnt' realize that different angles would explain the difference, anyways the shots on the gf4, the background trees are more detailed if you can notice it that close. the rock textures are more standout on the gf4.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by thcdru2k
my bad..didnt' realize that different angles would explain the difference, anyways the shots on the gf4, the background trees are more detailed if you can notice it that close. the rock textures are more standout on the gf4.

yeah, i noticed that the colors were a bit more vibrant on the GF4 shot.

[Bigus Dickus]

Looks like a minor LOD difference to me (very minor though). This isn't uncommon at all, as NVIDIA commonly plays with LOD from driver to driver. Comparisons of screenshots from games and 3dMark over time shows ATI and NVIDIA flip-flopping on who has the lower default LOD, and it can even be different in DX and OGL.

IMO, they're probably doing this to find the best balance between aliasing and detail on the most popular titles out at the time, and everyone has their own personal preference as to what that balance is. If I understand Chalnoth correctly, he would seem to prefer a higher LOD bias (lower detail) with less aliasing than what is commonly used.

NVIDIA has been accused of using higher LOD bias in the past as a means of picking up extra speed, but I don't think that's factual. As I said, I think both IHV's play with the LOD for visual quality reasons.

And, more detail doesn't always give the best end result. As an example, fire up SS:SE and max out the level of detail settings. Static screenshots will look great, but without some massive SSAA or AF to help, the aliasing will be excruciating.