Will upgrading my GFX card improve Blitz much?

I'm currently running:

Athlon 4200+ Dual Core CPU
2 GB RAM
Windows XP
Nvidia 256MB 6600GT AGP Graphics card


I'm thinking of upgrading to an ATI 3850 AGP 512MB card before going for a whole system upgrade sometime next year.

Will I see a huge improvement in 3D blitz performance? I'm also expecting an improvement in games performance but am interested in B3D too.

I think it would improve the Framerates depend on what you making

In theory, the 3850 should blow the 6600 out of the water.
For some benchmark numbers, see here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati-agp-3850-agp,1939-4.html

From that page: The 6600GT AGP gets 0.52 FPS in crysis 9Medium-low, no AA) while the 3850 gets 18.1 FPS in 1920x1200 resolution.

In 3DMark 2006 @ 1280x1024 the 6600GT gets a score of 691, and the 3850 AGP gets 4907, so a 7-fold increase... Which seems to show that the 3850 is a much better card than the 6600.

However, it's important to remember something: the newer cards tend to be optimized for DirectX 9/10, not the DirectX 7 used by blitz3D. While you should still see a speed increase over the old card, it may not be as dramatic when using DX7. The video card is probably the biggest bottleneck for most Blitz games though, so upgrading it tends to make a bigger difference to FPS and the likes than getting a better CPU

My 8800 GTX certainly gave me a power boost in Blitz3D over my X800XL.

It's similar to the perfomance gain you get for playing games. Possibly, you don't get maximum gains in Blitz3D; however, you should be able to have more complex scenes with more effects.

well I have a spinning cube and a terrain tiled with video of metal gear solid 2. I'm hoping it will let me add a floating teapot and keep things smooth.

When you say video, you're not referring to the use of the built-in b3d commands for that job I hope?

Last I checked (years ago), when you use the DrawVideo command (or whatever it was called), the app's framerate gets locked down to the framerate of the video in play.

Blitz3D is hopelessly out of date - in other words don't expect to be able to do Crysis-grade graphics or even FarCry-grade graphics with it, no matter what video card you have, or you'll be disappointed. A faster video card will speed things up a little, but not much, especially since DirectX 7 is obsolete and drivers often don't support it as well.

will b3d ever have an update to work with direct x 10?

Never say never, but I think it's safe to say "don't hold your breath"...

Well said. OpenGL FTW! :o>

Maybe once Visual Studio and DirectX 10 work on OS X. So never.

I was only joking with my comment on teapots and landscapes, I'd not realised though about the framerate being locked to the video though, that's a good tip, thanks. Obviously my main reason to upgrade is games, but it will be nice to have blitz go a little faster. I'm starting to play with XNA programming, so I'd expect a big improvement there with it being DirectX 9 based.

I experienced that ATI cards suffer a bigger slow down in Blitz3D, especially if there are a lot of surfaces on screen.

Replacing my nVidia 5900 XT with the faster ATI 1950 Pro didn't make much difference in Blitz3D speed, while Blitz3D feeled twice as fast after changing from ATI 1950 PRO to 8800 GT...

OpenGL is obsolete too :)

Seriously, OpenGL has always been playing "catch-up" to DirectX - it's interface is much more messy, it's bloated, and generally runs slower than DirectX. Everybody had high hopes for OpenGL 3.0 to change all this, but unfortunately it turns out they messed that up too, so right now DirectX is pretty much the only way to go for games.

...which is hardly surprising, since the 8800GT scores more than 4 times as fast than the X1950 Pro in the Crysis benchmark tests:



That particular increase has a lot less to do with ATI vs. nvidia, and more with the 8800GT just being a much faster card in general.

IS there a blitz3d benchmark type thing I could run before I upgrade my card tonight to check the improvement. Maybe just a blitzgame demo that's graphics intensive or something like that.
I have fraps installed, will that show FPS for blitz applications?

Sure. But at least it'll still actually run, despite being obsolete.

I think your cpu will be a bottleneck for such a card.

If you're lucky. OpenGL is poorly supported on old video cards, and on new video cards, it's obsolete. The only advantage is it's cross-platform.

Looks like you were right about it improving newer games more.
My benchmarks:

3DMark 2001 - 6600GT - 13461 ----> 20239 - HD3850
Half Life 2 - Episode 1 (1680x1050) - 6600GT - 22.8FPS ------> 91.3FPS - HD3850

I'm a happy man.


Right, back to playing commander keen,