Underperforming radeon 9800 pro?

[Louster]

HI FOLKS.

HI THERe.

I bought a radeon 9800 pro a while back to replace my geforce 3 ti 200. Having never actually gone into the guts of my computer before, having a dad that's done most of this stuff for me forever, I managed to get it in reasonably easily.
The thing is, I haven't really been able to notice any difference.
Most games seem to perform just as poorly as they did before the change. I've done a whole lot of stuff with drivers, and they're as updated as they can possibly get without travelling into the future and uh, to no avail and stuff. This is including motherboard drivers.
I haven't really been able to prove exactly how much, if any, difference it's made, as I didn't run any benchmarks or whatever beforehand, but games still run badly, like I said.

A lot of the people I've spoken to about this have suggested that it's my CPU, being a fairly old celeron 1.7ghz, but surely, the upgrade should have made SOME difference even accounting for that, right? Also, my motherboard is likely not ideal either; although I don't know its specifics, it only supports 4x AGP, but that shouldn't be TOO much of a hinderance either, right?
I got a few suspicious lockups trying out morrowind before I updated the drivers, and now I get some weird bug in bf1942 which doesn't bother me so much, but other than that it seems to be working perfectly fine. Underperformance notwithstanding.
Uh. In morrowind, for instance, I get a consistently lower than 30fps framerate with the same settings I used with my previous card, and that's about the same speed, I think. Max payne 2 suffers from a lot of slowdown even during actionless scenes, depending on the environment (the bit where you went underground for a while in the explodey bit near the end got me down to like 10fps). The settings are set to their default, "balanced".

.PLEH

 

[Ch3tan]

I'd say based on what I was told when upgrading that your CPU is causing bottle neck, 4x AGP can't help either.

 

[Louster]

Well, okay, but is there any way of proving this to me before I throw money at the problem?

 

[Trem]

I know from what Throddy says that the Radeon runs open gl games worse than the Ge-Force.

 

[Ch3tan]

I'd disagree with throddy there. My old OpenGL games run sweetly. HL and mods for example run at a steady 100fps (capped) and never drop -now if he is comparing frame rates above that, why?

Also that 100fps is at better quality settings than my geforce could handle, with 2*AA and 8* Ansiotropic.

 

[Louster]

Heh, right but there's definitely something wrong with my performance, as it shouldn't be this low. Uh, oh yes, I noticed a few comparisons on tomshardware, like http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030120/vgacharts-04.html
This is what worries me, basically. My machine gets around 82fps average running that same thing. It seems that even a geforce 4 ti4400 with a 1ghz athlon performs better than my 1.7ghz celeron and radeon 9800 pro, which I really, really can't understand.

 

[Ch3tan]

I blame the celery.

 

[throdgrain]

Ive changed loads of video cards, and never got an actual performance increase in terms of faster fps, except when I went from a onboard video card to a Voodoo 3 quite a while ago
Take my case for example. System before change -
Athlon XP2600+
1024 mb PC2700 ram
NVidea GF4400

Rest of it is irrelevant.

I replaced the GF4400 for a 9800pro. In CS and half life , I would guess at a loss of maybe 10% in fps terms ? Maybe even as low as 5 % . However , whatever you say, not an improvement !
Chetan is going from a GF2 ultra if Im right, thats a very old card, maybe thats why hes seen a slight improvement, even then Im suprised in a game as old as Counter-Strike. Also he says he gets 100 fps all the time, but he doesnt say what resolution he runs, you just have to take these things into consideration.
On the positive side, on the old set up I could run BF1942 at 1024-768 and get reasonable fps (70-100), now with the new card I can run it at the maximum resolution and get exactly the same fps. Not more you'll notice, but the same at a higher resolution.
Do the q3 timedemo, on the GF4400 i was getting about 245 fps at 1024-768. With the radion I get about 240 at 1024-768. BUT, I also get 240 fps at 1600-1200 ! Whereas with the NVidea 1600-1200 would return a much lower figure.
On the other hand, a while ago I changed my XP2000+ cpu for a XP2600+. The difference in speed was about 20 to 25% ,measured in fps , across the board on all games.
To sumarise this long post (sorry!) imo a good video card makes things look prettier.
A bigger CPU makes things faster .

Phew !

 

[Trem]

More ram is where you see the best results imo.

 

[throdgrain]

When i went from 512 to 1024 ram I saw some fps improvements on really intensive games, like BF and Vietcong. Not so much that the fps was higher in the highest spots, but that it was higher in the lower spots, if you follow me
Im still a great believer in cpu=speed though tbh
/me looks at xp3000+

 

[Louster]

Heh righto. Money spendin' time then I spose.

 

[Clowneh!]

I thought you didn't like to play games anyway?

 

[Louster]

Yeah seriously but having a radeon 9800 and not really getting anything out of it is lamoid.

 

[Clowneh!]

Or you could sell it and get some money back instead of spending more money

 

[Louster]

OR I COULD STAB YOU IN THE FACE and everybody wins.

 

[Clowneh!]

S'up to you rich boy, I'll inject you with bread.

 

[Louster]

=[[[[[[[[[[[[
Actually since that'd bypass my intestines that wouldn't have any detrimental effect other than, like, instantly killing me. Neato.

 

[Clowneh!]

I didn't say where. Now I know your weak spot!

 

[Louster]

=[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[

 

[Wij]

I upgraded from a GF3 to a 9800 non-pro and everything runs miles better for me. My cpu is an XP 1800+ and I have 1gig PC2100. Halo is smooth now

 

[Dr_Weasel]

The 4x AGP wont cause much of a slow down.

Im running a 9800Pro with a 4x motherboard and it still runs like the dogs danglies. Ive also got an AMD2400 and 1 Gig of PC2700 ram and I get about 5300 in 3dmark2003.

 

[throdgrain]

Im not saying it wont run better, as I did say it picks up the points where fps would suffer very well indeed.
But in fps terms Ive never ever seen a increase in the top end speed without a corresponding processor increase too.
Good example is my mate who plays cs, since 1.6 came out his fps has suffered quite badly, and he cannot understand it as he has a 9700 pro.
His cpu however is an athlon 1600

 

[Ash!]

Ditch the Celery mate. It has an extremely low cache onbaord. Games like Max Payne 2 & BF1942 are pretty intensive on the processor. This will contribute to the slow down you mentioned

 

[Big G]

Also with CS 1.6, de_aztec will eat fps on top spec machines simply because those weather effects (so i read) aren't ideal for the type of gfx engine CS uses (which i believe is related to the quake2 engine?). Hence, the fps tend to be shit even on a brutal machine.

'cl_weather 0' is your friend here.

I agree with throd on the fps not being any different to the GF4 Ti4400 on CS, but where the GF4 would crawl to a halt (lots of smoke, or when you turn AA on) the 9800 Pro flies.

32 player aztec with smoke ahoy never slows for me now.

G

 

[Ch3tan]

I use 1280*1024 in all the games I can, so at that res going from a gf2 to a radeon sees massive improvements.