My 9700 Pro 3DMark03 Scores below average

[NeCo]

Hi peeps,

I've just upgraded to a Hercules 9700 Pro from a Geforce 3 Ti 500 as I needed a card that supported dual display.

Now I have to say that so far my scores in 3DMark and my overall FPS' are very disappointing.

Check out this 3DMark03 comparison of my setup against an almost identical one.

NB: Previous score was just over 2000, this link shows my current score of just over 4300 now.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=77193

Also my ingame scores for things like Unreal Tournament and UT2K3 have not improved. In UT running in OpenGL I now get around 90 - 100 FPS where as my GF3 used to give me between 120 - 150 and even hit 200+ in some places. UT2k3 seems to sit aroud the 45 - 60 FPS mark which isn't much of an improvement over the 35 - 45 my GF3 was capable of.

Edit : Have tried to run UT in Direct 3D instead of OpenGl and it just crashes every time now. OPenGl still works if you switch it back but is definately not as smooth as on the GF3

Any ideas where its all going wrong!?!

FYI, I'm currently using Cat 3.1's

Any help would be appreciated as this is my first ATI card so I may be missing something.

NeCo

[-=DVS=-]

ROFL oh boy noone will get more then 5000 in 3DMark 2003

(people getting over 10 000 in this benchmark)
Try running 3Dmark 2001 !!

See the difference 3Dmark 2k1 and 2k3 !

I am getting just 4500 in 3Dmark 2k3 that is normal for Radeon9700Pro without any overcloak or tweaking

CPU might be holding you back or other parts of your computer what do you have ?

[NeCo]

I think I may have figured some of it out.

After reinstalling the Cat 3.1's and the new ATI Control Panel as well, the performance has almost doubled.

Before, even if i set the D3D and OpenGl bars over to Maximum Performance, they didn't seem to make any difference, but after installing the new version Control Panel and wiping the one that came on the Hercules Install CD, doing the same thing almost doubles my 3dMark and my frame rates in UT2K3.

I still have the problem with the original Unreal Tournament in that it will run in OpenGl but has lighting problems and lower framerates than on my GF3, but if i try and change the renderer to D3D, the game crashes with a critical error 'Failed blt: DD_OK'

I think my best bet here is to try a reinstall and see if that allows me to use D3D, and if the framerates improve over the opengl ones.

[NeCo]

Ok, I haven't got D3d working with the original Unreal Tournament, but I have found out what was causing the problems with it running in Open GL.

Basically, when I had the sliders in the ATI Open GL 'Advanced Settings' tab set to Max Performance, I had problems with stuttering graphics and dodgy lighting even though the game was stating framerates of 100 - 150 FPS.

I then set the sliders to Best Quality, with all the AA and AF at max. All the GFX problems disappeared and the game looked great. Even better was the fact that the game was still showing framerates of 90 - 120 FPS.

Strange eh!

Hope some others find this info useful and I'll post again if I sort out the D3D probs.

;)