9600 under winME vs WinXP

[Rhagz]

OK, my friend has a xp2600 and a radeon 9600 video card. He was running WinME with 512MB of RAM and just recently upgraded to WinXP and 1GB of RAM.. well there seems to be some problem and I am not sure what it would be. Here is a repost of what he got:

I was on a Windows ME system with 512M of RAM. This is the stats I got with aquamark3:

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+ CR: 1908 MHz SRAM: 512 MB OS: Microsoft Windows ME
GFX: RADEON 9600 SERIES CM: 0 / 0 MHz VRAM: 128 MB DRIVER: 4.14.1.247
# 1 AquaMark Score: 24068 (CPU: 4398, GFX: 3315) FPS: 24.07 TPS: 7245 K Compare
RES: 1024x768 x 32bit AA: Off AF: 4x DETAILS: Very High

Now I decided to upgrade to 1G of RAM, and upgrade to WinXP since ME doesnt support it. This is what I got:

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+ CR: 1908 MHz SRAM: 1024 MB OS: Microsoft Windows XP
GFX: RADEON 9600 SERIES CM: 398 / 297 MHz VRAM: 123 MB DRIVER: 6.14.10.6490
# 1 AquaMark Score: 20209 (CPU: 4048, GFX: 2694) FPS: 20.21 TPS: 6083 K Compare
RES: 1024x768 x 32bit AA: Off AF: 4x DETAILS: Very High

I downloaded the latest ATI driver and DX9.0c for each mesurement. So why do I get 4k LESS performance after doubling my RAM and upgrading from ME to XP?

He assured me that both sticks of RAM were PC2700.. he ran the first test with each stick to test them and they both scored the same. There is a huge loss on the graphics score, so it leads me to believe its a driver issue, but I am pretty sure he used the same driver on both test. Anything that we are overlooking here?

 

[Rhagz]

shameless bump! help me help him before WoW starts tomorrow!

 

[Matthias99]

I'll assume you at least checked the obvious things (like having AA/AF forced on in the driver control panels, etc...)

Your MB drivers are different (or at least it's reporting them differently). It's possible something got screwed up there. First, make sure you have the drivers installed, and that they're the latest version (WinXP may have installed old, crappy ones by default without asking). Also, run 'dxdiag' from Start/"Run..." and see what it says about "AGP Texture Acceleration". If it's "Off" or "Disabled", you need to reinstall your chipset and graphics drivers (and possibly DirectX as well).

 

[Fern]

He may have used "quality" settings instead of "performance" settings on this last test w/XP. That could account for the drop in the gfx portion of the bench.

As far as the drop for the cpu side, maybe the gig of ram doesn't have good timings (like cas 2) like the 512MB did?

Fern

 

[Rhagz]

He said he changed the slider to full performance with no results. I thought about the timing issue on the cpu side, but both sticks i believe are just generic 2700. The main issue is the graphics score, and I dont think the ram would have that much effect on it.