Hi, I just replaced my ageing Radeon 9800XT (256Mb GDDR2 RAM) with a Sapphire Radeon HD 2600XT (512Mb GDDR3 RAM) and the new card totally stinks at Direct X in BlitzMax. Both cards are AGP. So my old card is 4 years old and then new one has faster GPU, VRAM, and better fill rate etc. My PC is a P4 3.2GHz, XP SP2, 1GB RAM. Here's some stats...
My game is running at 800x600 full-screen (I also tried Windowed mode and the figures are similar).
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 710FPS with it off.
- 2600XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 282FPS with it off.
Here's where it gets really bad. When I press "D" my framework displays a Debug panel which uses the default Blitzmax Font to show various stats, here's the FPS when that is showing.
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 332FPS with it off. Clear the DrawText command is pretty damn slow.
- 2600XT gives 49FPS with VSync on and 49FPS with it off! That's not a typo, it can't even maintain at 60Hz display when showing a few lines of debug text over my game screen. And VSync doesn't speed it up, unbelievable!
But what about OpenGL? Well it's fine for OpenGL. Some stats:
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 1072FPS with it off.
- 2600XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 1026FPS with it off. In other words it's comparible; probably there's a CPU bottleneck.
Just to be certain it was not a driver issue I uninstalled the whole ATI control panel thing then removed the 2600XT driver and reinstalled it again from the inf file that comes with the Catalyst 8.9 (17th Sept 2008) drivers. Same result. I took the card out, and put the 9800XT back in and wiped and reinstalled the drivers and was getting a decent speed.
ALSO I have an X1950 Pro card (256MB GDDR3) which I stopped using as it was overheating + noisy, I plugged this in and wiped/reinstalled drivers and it gets slightly better performance than my 9800XT indicating a CPU bottleneck.
So anyone got any ideas why the new card is so absolutely stinky at DX? It's a DX10 card and BlitzMax is using DX7, so maybe it just doesn't work well with DX7, but I have loads of old DX7 games (not tried them yet).
Can anyone recommend any DX benchmarking software so I can see if the card is performing as it should be in that please? Thx.
I read a while back that it's possible to get BlitzMax to use a DX9 driver, so I may try that as an experiment...
Thanks in advance for any advice/info you may have.
My game is running at 800x600 full-screen (I also tried Windowed mode and the figures are similar).
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 710FPS with it off.
- 2600XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 282FPS with it off.
Here's where it gets really bad. When I press "D" my framework displays a Debug panel which uses the default Blitzmax Font to show various stats, here's the FPS when that is showing.
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 332FPS with it off. Clear the DrawText command is pretty damn slow.
- 2600XT gives 49FPS with VSync on and 49FPS with it off! That's not a typo, it can't even maintain at 60Hz display when showing a few lines of debug text over my game screen. And VSync doesn't speed it up, unbelievable!
But what about OpenGL? Well it's fine for OpenGL. Some stats:
- 9800XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 1072FPS with it off.
- 2600XT gives 60FPS with VSync on and 1026FPS with it off. In other words it's comparible; probably there's a CPU bottleneck.
Just to be certain it was not a driver issue I uninstalled the whole ATI control panel thing then removed the 2600XT driver and reinstalled it again from the inf file that comes with the Catalyst 8.9 (17th Sept 2008) drivers. Same result. I took the card out, and put the 9800XT back in and wiped and reinstalled the drivers and was getting a decent speed.
ALSO I have an X1950 Pro card (256MB GDDR3) which I stopped using as it was overheating + noisy, I plugged this in and wiped/reinstalled drivers and it gets slightly better performance than my 9800XT indicating a CPU bottleneck.
So anyone got any ideas why the new card is so absolutely stinky at DX? It's a DX10 card and BlitzMax is using DX7, so maybe it just doesn't work well with DX7, but I have loads of old DX7 games (not tried them yet).
Can anyone recommend any DX benchmarking software so I can see if the card is performing as it should be in that please? Thx.
I read a while back that it's possible to get BlitzMax to use a DX9 driver, so I may try that as an experiment...
Thanks in advance for any advice/info you may have.