I've just bought a Radeon ATI 9800 Pro 128bit card and installed it into my system. I have an Athlon XP 2400+ (2.01Ghz), Gigabyte Mobo (133/266 FSB, supports up to XP 2400+) with all drivers installed, 2x256MB DDR PC2100 ram, 80GB 7200rpm HD and a Creative SBLive! 5.1 soundcard.
Before I got the 9800 pro I had an Nvidia gf3 ti200 64mb card.
Now, based on my original system I was expecting a decent increase in performance for my graphics but things didn't turn out that way.
In Call of Duty I got an average FPS of 56 with my old card (Using timedemo on a 3 minute demo with around 16 players on mp_habor). When I ran the same demo with my 9800 pro I was shocked to see zero difference to my FPS!
It averaged 55-56, dipped at the same spots and peaked no higher than my old card.
The strange thing is I scored over 5000 on 3dMark03 with my new card, and that's around what I expected with my new system. All the other games I tested (GTA 3 and Vice City, Splinter Cell, Sacred and a few others) all showed a marked improvement in frame rates, all running very smoothly on the highest settings.
It just seems that COD is the only game that has shown no improvement whatsoever. In fact, for some unknown reason, COD now runs slower than it did before!
I've tried all the recomended troubleshooting, including using Driver Cleaner to remove all old Nvidia drivers, ensuring my ATI settings are all optimised (AGP x4 is enabled, OpenGL settings are optimised and so on), reverting to older Catalyst drivers (I have tried 4.6 and 4.5 so far) and even checking my bios settings; but still no improvement with COD, even if I reduce all graphics settings to the bare minimum.
My only theory is that my mobo/ram/cpu setup might be acting as a bottleneck but looking at similar systems on 3dmark2001 comparisons I should still be getting over 14000 with that; I'm not, though. My score in 3dmark2001 with my 9800 pro is a feeble 9600.
So, I'm getting a decent boost in performance in most games, except COD. I get a decent score in 3dmark03 but a poor one in 3dmark2001. I've tried everything I can think of to solve the issue with COD but to no avail.
I'm out of ideas!
I plan to upgrade my mobo, cpu and memory to 400mhz fsb equivalents soon, so perhaps that'll solve this problem but, having spent £125 on the card I'd have to say I feel I've wasted my money for the time being as COD is the game I play the most right now.
One last thing, transparant graphics look very poor with the new card. Ie, when the screen fades to black, or a semi-transparent scoreboard overlay appears, it looks very blocky and patchy (almost like the kind of pixelation you see where a 256 colour palette tries to do transparency or shading with an image that should use 32-bit colour palettes).
Has anyone got any ideas as to why this is happening, please?
Thanks in advance.
Before I got the 9800 pro I had an Nvidia gf3 ti200 64mb card.
Now, based on my original system I was expecting a decent increase in performance for my graphics but things didn't turn out that way.
In Call of Duty I got an average FPS of 56 with my old card (Using timedemo on a 3 minute demo with around 16 players on mp_habor). When I ran the same demo with my 9800 pro I was shocked to see zero difference to my FPS!
It averaged 55-56, dipped at the same spots and peaked no higher than my old card.
The strange thing is I scored over 5000 on 3dMark03 with my new card, and that's around what I expected with my new system. All the other games I tested (GTA 3 and Vice City, Splinter Cell, Sacred and a few others) all showed a marked improvement in frame rates, all running very smoothly on the highest settings.
It just seems that COD is the only game that has shown no improvement whatsoever. In fact, for some unknown reason, COD now runs slower than it did before!
I've tried all the recomended troubleshooting, including using Driver Cleaner to remove all old Nvidia drivers, ensuring my ATI settings are all optimised (AGP x4 is enabled, OpenGL settings are optimised and so on), reverting to older Catalyst drivers (I have tried 4.6 and 4.5 so far) and even checking my bios settings; but still no improvement with COD, even if I reduce all graphics settings to the bare minimum.
My only theory is that my mobo/ram/cpu setup might be acting as a bottleneck but looking at similar systems on 3dmark2001 comparisons I should still be getting over 14000 with that; I'm not, though. My score in 3dmark2001 with my 9800 pro is a feeble 9600.
So, I'm getting a decent boost in performance in most games, except COD. I get a decent score in 3dmark03 but a poor one in 3dmark2001. I've tried everything I can think of to solve the issue with COD but to no avail.
I'm out of ideas!
I plan to upgrade my mobo, cpu and memory to 400mhz fsb equivalents soon, so perhaps that'll solve this problem but, having spent £125 on the card I'd have to say I feel I've wasted my money for the time being as COD is the game I play the most right now.
One last thing, transparant graphics look very poor with the new card. Ie, when the screen fades to black, or a semi-transparent scoreboard overlay appears, it looks very blocky and patchy (almost like the kind of pixelation you see where a 256 colour palette tries to do transparency or shading with an image that should use 32-bit colour palettes).
Has anyone got any ideas as to why this is happening, please?
Thanks in advance.