Any idea why my Radeon 2600XT stinks at DX7?

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.

I don't know if you're running Vista but DX7 is emulated on Vista, and it is slow (sort of "translated" to DX10). full screen OpenGL is not.

I'm running XP, (edited top post)

There are some older motherboards where you must flash a new BIOS version to avoid problems with older AGP boards and ATI cards.

Try to find the lattest version for you board. I also recommand to uninstall the drivers first-->flash Bios-->reinstall drivers.

But first, play other games to see if the problem is still present.

bye

I strongly advise against flashing the BIOS unless you're absolutely 100% certain that you'll fix the problem in doing so.

Get it wrong - bye bye motherboard.

Anyhoo...

Have you installed the drivers that came with it on a CD? Or downloaded the latest ones? I ask because the 7.2 Catalyst drivers were complete crud, to the extent that I went back to Nvidia.

Also, I had a problem with my ATI Radeon 9600 whereby nothing that required DirectX hardware would work. Turned out there was a big lump of dust jammed in the AGP slot. So I'd also make sure its seated properly if the latest drivers don't help.

Should also upgrade to XP SP3 ;)

Have your tried 8.8 hotfix drivers for AGP cards.

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=99286

Jason

Abrexxes: Yeah more testing may be required before I resort to a bios flash. As I've said above OpenGL performance is fine.

GfK: Yeah first I had the drivers from the CD (Catalyst 7.10) and then later I put on Catalyst 8.9, still crappy in DX but not GL. It doesn't sound like a seating problem otherwise GL wouldn't work either. Been considering XP3 upgrade for a little while, but I have most of the incremental upgrades anyway. Doubt it'll fix this too.

Jason W.: Got 8.9 installed, shouldn't that include the 8.8 hot fix ones?

Just took out my X1950 and put the 2600XT back in, deleted the driver, booted in safe mode and cleaned out old driver files with Drive Sweeper, then installed the 8.8 hot fix (the one that is for AGP and DirectX issues) but alas it made no difference to the DX speed. This is annoying...

So are there any DX only benchmarks out there I can use? This card is wasting so much time it's costing me a fortune. Thing is getting a decent AGP card is next to impossible now. Problem with the more powerful ones is they need silly Watts on the PSU and are noisy. I actually have a decent 450W PSU but I'm running two hard drives, 2 optical drives, an external sound card hub thing and several USB devices plus the P4 is power hungry so I think they eat up the power a lot and don't leave enough for the X1950 which used to hang quite often (it could just be faulty).

Did you reinstall XP from scratch when you replaced the card? Uninstalling drivers doesn't necessarily remove them so it may be confused. Edit: if you do make sure you format the drive too.

On a system of the spec you're talking about, that 450W PSU could be running very close to 100% output.

Depending how many USB devices you've got dangling off your PC, it could actually be on its little PSU knees begging for mercy.

@markcw: There's no way I'm doing that as I don't have 2 days to put my system back the way it was :-) Like I said I cleaned out the drivers with a special program that's highly recommended called Drive Sweeper.

Well I had less than that before but I replaced it with a Q-tech (special expensive quiet PSU made with quality parts). I don't have that many USB things actually and they are often off, do you really think 4 drives and an external sound card thing really consume that much power? Anyway the new card (2600XT) doesn't need as much power as the X1950XT which did need 450W as it had two molex connectors going into it (via a Y splitter).

Why did you upgrade?

Reinstall the latest version of Direct X.

@MGE: Here's the story. My Radeon 9800XT was very noisy due to an old fan and lots of use after 4 years, so last December I bought an X1950 which was nice and fast but seemed to hang occasionally (which I put down to my PSU being overloaded, or a card fault) - I put up with this for a bit but then saw it as a risk to the code I was developing (imagine a hang mid-save...) So I went back to the 9800XT. Then recently the 9800XT starting putting purple garbage all over the screen several times a day so I looked into current AGP cards that didn't need loads of power instead of things like the 3850, and there really aren't many. The 2600XT seemed the best way to go in terms of PSU requirements and performance so I got one, but I have this stinky DX issue. Helen's vista laptop with nothing special runs my game better...

Of course in about 2 months I'll be getting a brand new PCI-Express based system so this won't be an issue, but I need a card meanwhile to finish my current game and spending £80 on a beefy quality PSU (to run the X1950) seems silly...(I know you can get cheap big Watts PSUs but I heard that they are cheap because they are crap of course :-))

If you want DX7 benchmarking software - isn't there a 3DMArK benchmark from either 199x or 2001 available that was for Dx7 tech? Would it be worth trying that.

@TaskMaster: done that.

@Matty: OK thanks may well check them out.

You could just use OpenGL ;]

I'm suprised actually, I thought ATIs OGL support was supposed to be horrible.

You do realize that you bought an ATI card, right?

Latest drivers? ;)

Here's a thought. Does your motherboard have integrated video? Are you sure that it is disabled in BIOS?

Yeah I'm gonna have to do that. I'm just fussy. A brand new card is worse than my 5 year old Radeon 9800 at DX! Arg. It just seemed so slow that I thought there might be a problem.

Yeah read the posts ;-)

No it doesn't, I always used to get motherboards with no built in video as a preference.

Still.....it does sound like something is wrong. I can't imagine a newer card being worse than an older card.

For the hell of it, I'd take it back and get another of the same card, just to be sure it wasn't a fluke. Which does happen from time to time.

Is there something in the driver itself that is switched on that could be influencing the framerate?

I'd still be looking at the PSU, tbh.

Check the 12v rail on the PSU - the output should be at 20 amps. If its 16 or 18 then its likely causing the problem (the lower the amps, the more likely that its the problem).

Much more to PSUs than simply the wattage.

sigh, it's an ebay purchase = hassle.

I installed it from scratch so it's default + I checked all the settings and they seem fine.

Don't forget I'm still getting >1000FPS in OpenGL it's just a directX problem, so I don't think there's a problem with the PSU, it's not logical that it would only affect DX.

OK some new info, I managed to get my game running with a DX9 driver in BMax and the framerate is now totally fine. So it appears that some modern cards are running BMax DX7 games VERY slowly. This may be a problem. BMax should be updated to use DX8 at the very least, but DX9 would be better.

"So it appears that some modern cards are running BMax DX7 games VERY slowly."

I don't think we can say "card(s)" quite yet. ;) We need to do more testing and hopefully this is one way to do so....

I've posted a benchmark test in the Blitzmax programming forum and also on Indiegamer. So far the speeds reported seem fine. I did have one computer (a HP Tablet PC ) run very slowly. But the drivers have not been updated yet.

So let's hope we find a pattern where 1 card or 1 configuration is causing a slow down. I'd hate to find out that this is a substantial stable problem on a variety of cards!

I guess really we need someone else with the same card. I was hearing reports about people who "upgraded" to this card from older cards and were getting half the framerate in WoW, but that's probably not a DX7 game.

"I guess really we need someone else with the same card."

Agreed. But the main thing to do is find out just how wide spread this potential dx7 slow down really is. With this card and other cards as well.

I have the Radeon HD 2600 XT.

Plash, Please visit this thread:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=80502

And download the dx7 test I made and report your results in the thread. Thanks!

@Plash: Better still, download the modified test that I uploaded which includes DX7/DX9 and OGL. Thx! :-) And please let me know how much RAM your 2600 has and what speed the RAM is.

DX7 performs worse because DX10 cards are optimized for shaders.
They are worse than the old generation at fixed function pipeline applications.

This is no myth nor in any way surprising. This has been known since the GeForce 7 -> GeForce 8 switch which has shown this exact phenomenom as well with older games that are FFP with only very few shaders.

The less shader driven the game is, the better the older cards (X1900 and before, GeForce 7900 and before) will perform compared to the new one.

Yeah this card is a DX10 card so I thought it might be something like that, it's just that the DX7 is SOOO bad, also the DX9 and OGL aren't that good when compared to other cards in the Bmax Programming forum thread about MGE's test app. It's like the drivers or card are just screwed or crap, but other people seem to be getting real stinky performance too with the same card.

1) DX10 cards do not run DX7 programs at 10% of their DX9 counterparts' speed.
2) Grey's problem is isloated to a very small % of people (2 out of all the people in the 'test program' thread)

Even DX9 wouldn't make a difference. This is pure FFP and DX10 cards have to emulate FFP through shaders that are part of the driver. Those shaders perform worse than the original FFP hardware did, point. There is nothing that will change that as the FFP stuff can not be nearly as parallized as the shader stuff of DX9 SM2+ pure shader and DX10 so the card is not able to use its potential -> so cards with more shader units won't change anything beside the fact that they will run on even lower load

If you want to see good performance for 2D on that card use XNA. Its pure shader, no FFP code at all and requires SM2+ (as GPUs need since Dec 2006 for a full DX9.0c compliance). TorqueX is an option here for example

<sigh> You havn't read either thread very well, have you...