Geforce GTS2 + Athlon550 + kx133 (not irongate 750) = low fps q3arena

[nsadhal]

okay, i recently bought a creative 3d blaster annihilator 2 Geforce2 GTS... but found out that the old irongate 750 chipset on my FIC sd11 mobo was too stupid to handle it and i had to run in agp 1x. so i replaced my sd11 with a soltek sl-77kv with the kx133 chipset hoping it would make full use of my geforce. agp 4x is enabled in the bios, i updated my via chipset drivers, and i have the latest nvidia reference drivers, but my framrates are worse than before.
with my sd11, i was getting about 60 fps in a quake 3 timedemo in "normal" mode. now i get 40 fps. i thought my frames were supposed to shoot way up! what's going on?

 

[Yoshi]

AGP is a joke, if you have not come to that conclusion by now you are a bit behind the times. It certainly will not cause your frame rate to "shoot up."

 

[nsadhal]

ok, i know it's not going to shoot up like crazy, but i didn't think it'd make it slower. i just flahsed my bios to the latest one from the soltek site, and now i get about 58 fps, this still bugs, becasue that's what i was getting before, with agp 1x, isn't agp 4x going to make it any better?
58 fps for a geforce2 seems rather slow.
i must say i'm disappointed, having spent over $200 on a graphics card

 

[da loser]

where did you get one for $200 or did you mean 200+? also agp4x like above is a hype word with games, no real benefits because it has 64mb of ram, right now.

 

[Brian48]

A few questions. Did you reformat the drive before you install the new motherboard? Also, which miniport driver did you install for your motherboard, the v4.61 AMD one or the v4.03 VIA one. If you installed the AMD one or it was left there from the previous MB, you may have screwed yourself.

 

[nsadhal]

ok, well it cost me 260, plus tax and shipping, so 290, but i got a free shipping certificate and 20 off which is supposed to be sent later, so it brings it back down to like 260ish.

ok, so this agp stuff is a joke... so was it really worth changing my motherboard from the fic sd11 (amd 750 chipset) to the soltek sl77kv (via kx133) chipset?
'cause i'm still disappointed with my performance. i thought geforce2 was way mad and crazy. i'm looking at the benchmarks for athlon 800 w/geforce 2 and nvidia reference 5.22, and on quake 3, "normal mode," 640x480, they're getting about 100 fps.
now, with my system oc'd to 633 from 550, but no oc on my geforce, i get about 65 fps in normal mode 640x480.

so i'm a little disappointed.
i hope it's not the cpu clock speed that's holding the framerate back, because that seems like a big difference in fps for just 176 mhz on the cpu.

 

[nsadhal]

oh, i did not reformat the drive and i installed the via 4.03 miniport. why would reformatting the drive make a difference?

 

[hyprxtension]

BTW, what is the expected frame rate for 800x600 on a GeForce2 in Q3A?

 

[nsadhal]

i don't know what's expected.
it would be helpful if someone could tell me what kind of fps i should be getting with a geforce2 on an athlon 550.
i hope it's not like 60. cause that's about what i get with all the settings at the lowest in q3.
i hope it's not my processor that's the bottleneck here. i don't wanna have to start overclocking like crazy just to get the max out of my geforce

 

[GDITheman]

I get 72 at 800x600 with 32 bit color and mosty of the stuff turned on. I have an Athlon 600 with Geforce 1 DDR.

 

[GopherMobile]

Hmm...try running it in 800x600 and 1024x768 normal mode. Just because you get a less than super high number at lower resolutions doesn't mean it's the video card's fault. Could be the CPU as a bottleneck, and until you get to higher resolutions it will continue to be. If you get similar FPS at 800x600 then it is, if it drops a fair amount then I dunno =).

 

[Remedy]

Isn't there a new agp GART driver that is used on the kx-133 chips i heard matt say it in the radeon review i think.

 

[nsadhal]

ok since yesterday, i have formatted my hard drive, installed windows 98, installed windows me, and installed win2k.
win 98/me was no improvement. i was getting about 67 fps max, with everything at the lowest in q3arena.
with win2k i get 77 fps in 640x480 with all the settings at the lowest. that's an improvement... i don't suspect the graphics card at all. i think it's my configuration... i'm beginning to susepct the processor, but according to Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261&p=9) i should be getting 95 fps... and that's an athlon 500, i have a 550. i don't even think i get 95 fps if my system is oc'd to 633 mhz.

this is my config right now:

windows 2000
Creative 3d blaster geforce2 gts
nvidia reference drivers 522 (don't tell me to get 532, that's not the problem)
amd athlon 550 (it's at 550 right now, not oc'd)
128 mb pc 100 sdram
soltek sl-77kv motherboard (kx133 chipset)
agp 4x enabled, fastwrites enabled.

 

[classy]

You should go into the bios and check your settings. I have never used a Soltek board, but it sounds like you are missing some optimizations in the bios. Check to make sure you L2 cache enabled and things of that nature. Just to give you an idea. With my Athon 700@750, Abit KA7 100, and V3 3000 in fastest settings I get 105-108fps. With the settings pretty much on high quality I get 90-95 fps. 640 x 480 of course.

 

[nsadhal]

yeah... but there's a lot of settings... i don't know which... i've called creative's tech support and they told that it might be because my graphics card was sharing an irq with five other things due to win2k's ACPI setup... so i disabled acpi in the bios and reinstalled windodws w/o ACPI support.... didn't work, even though the graphics card had it's own irq, i got the same frame rates.... somehow it seems like i need something more than just a few optimizations in the bios... because i think i'm something like 30 fps below what i should be getting. the highest i've seen is 85, and that's with my system oc'd to 633 mhz with my FSB running at 115 mhz. that's not even "normal" mode in quake either, that's with all the sliders to the left, everything in 16 bit... all the lowest settings....
i'm expecting like 95 fps in "normal" mode...

 

[nsadhal]

ok. still no progress yet. i called tech support again, and he told me sharing irqs would decrease performance... but screw that, becasue i already tried it and it didn't work. then he said the only thing he can tell me is to just try all the patches and bios settings and crap. wtf is that? so now i'm pissed and i know that the processor is holding me back somewhat, but the frame rate DOES drop when changing the resolution, though not by much. why am i not able to match the performance of an athlon 500, even when my system is running at 633?

 

[jpprod]

Your 640x480 score seems very low. I'd check two things:

1. Make absolutely sure that Vsync is disabled while benching. If it seems to be off, but you're not sure if it really is, try changing refresh rate. If it affects to your score, mystery solved.

2. Run your RAM at 133mhz/CAS3 if you have PC100 SDRAM or 133mhz/CAS2 if you have genuine PC133 SDRAM. Also, set memory timings to Turbo (setting names might vary between BIOSes). Default memory timing on VIA KX133/KT133 chipsets is much more conservative than on Intel and AMD chipsets.

 

[nsadhal]

ok, i tried setting my sdram to 133/cas3 (cause i have pc100), that gave me about 2 more frames. i'm at 82 now... btw, i'm running 98se again, not 2k. not much difference, i think i had a couple more fps in 2k.
i tried setting my timing to turbo too, but when i had the sdram clock at 133 and turbo on as well, quake froze. just having turbo on without setting the clock to 133 showed no improvement.

i'm very sure that my vsync is off. according to creative's display director (the util that creative distributes to help you tweak nvidia ref. drivers, as opposed to using creative's blastercontrol) vsync is "always OFF" for openGL. also, in 2k, i was getting fps ratings of 83 or so, and in 98se i'm getting about 80, i think my refresh rate is 60... and i can't change that, once i tried setting it to 70 and my display just wigged out.