hi,

i brought a connect3d ATI radeon 9600 pro after hearing about how good it was; i want 2 play doom3 when it comes out!

however the performance is awful; i only get 8900 in 3dmark 2001!! my GF4MX440 managed 5800!! From the reviews shouldnt i be nearing 12000?
this seems to have been a waste of money, or i have sumthing wrong with my system, which is unlikely as ive had it for 9 months and not 1 hardware prob.

This was my first ATI card and i doubt that i will buy another one; unreal tournament 2003 perfomance sucks as well:

Flyby: 125FPS
Botmatch: 45FPS

Thats at 1024*768; when i read the reviews the scores were better! my GF4MX gets 42 in the botmatch which is supposed to be as close to in game as possible!! also on the big maps even at default settings theres a horrible lag!!

I have played halo and thats pure painful so i returned it; powerpoint is a better slideslow!!!

i have never really o/cd nething as my cpu temp is always 47C+ (i have the stick cooler and 1 case fan with the PSU fan). Is there sumthing really wrong with my pc? i have catalyst 3.7.

here is the sys spec:

P4 2ghz
512DDR RAM @266mhz CL2.5
MSI 845 AR motherboard with AGP 4x
IBM Deskstar 120GXP 80gb HD
Quantum Fireball 15GB
ATI Radeon 9600 pro 128mb
LG CDRW/DVD combo
MSI 52XCDROM

Please help me!!! all i want to do is 2 play the odd game at max settings; i have had enuff crappy cards: intel 810; GF4MX now this!! i think that i will have to look at an XBOX to get good gaming... :oops:

Your cpu and chipset are too slow for the 9600 pro. Bottleneck :>

Yeah that CPU is too slow and so is the RAM -> as said: bottleneck.

what is all the problem about !!!, you say you have lost points in 3dmark 2001, but at what settings???, also your old MX 440 was a DX8 card and the 9600pro is a DX9 card thats y you have lost points, if you update your GFX card to play the latest DX9 games then run a DX9 bench mark and get a true representation of what you have gained.

With my GF4 ti4800se i sored 14,000points in 2001 and 1400points in 2003
With my 9600 Pro i score 9700points in 2001 but 3369 points in 2003

Also Aquamark scores me at 23,106 points

So Yes i Have lost alittle DX8 performance but have more than doubled my performance in DX9 applications, so you will find that Doom3 will run with out a problem on the 9600 but not on the MX, also you will find that you can Ramp up the Quality settings right up with the 9600,

Before i got this 9600 pro i bought a FX5600 and it was total toss 2500 points in 2003 and 9000 in 2001, so i took it back and got the 9600.

i did the benchmarks at the defualt settings ie 1024*768 with 32 bit colour. actually the gf4mx is a dx7 class card, it doesnt run the nature test. the frames in the car chase at higher detail are about 8 fps lower on the radeon 9600 pro.

can someone help me out coz i have no idea why my cpu and memory is such a bottleneck? i thought that a 2ghz and 512mb ram was pretty gd, obs not as gd as all the 3ghz ones, but half decent nonetheless!!

unreal 2003 requires a 32mb card and a 733mhz processor, so why am i still getting unplayable games; i turn off all open programs and still i get a dreadful gameplay

is there any way to bolster my gfx performance or am i stuck with this? i am depressed as i could have saved a lot of money had i gone for a ti 4300 which offers a similar performance; i always thought that the 9600pro beat everything in the class at the moment (excluding the 9500 pro)

well im running a 2400 xp CPU @2067hz & 400hz mem, but i see that your MoBo is only 4x AGP and 266 mem but still you should be getting more from your system that you are.

i heard that the actual difference in all AGP bandwiths is rubbish coz no game needs that kind of bandwith yet and almost all textures are rendered within the 128mb of my card. has my card got a defect init or something coz i am reslly upset with having to play games of yesteryear on medium settings!!

Any ideas on how to improve the performance aside O/Cing coz i shouldnt have to do that on a 2 week old card!!

there is always the chance that you have a faulty card or that it didnt install properly, also have you made sure you have the latest version of DX9 and drivers for your chipset its always worth a look also Cat 3.8's are out give them a try to.

just read on the other forum about reformatting the C: drive. i have a very mature xp installation (its stable after 6 months!!!!!!! ) so could this be the root of my problems. the big problem with this is that i will have to redownload all the xp fixes and with a 56k this thought feels really depressing

What should i do?

Ah you didn't back them up....

i used the windows update thingy :oops:

i have just done another set of benchmarks; i got 8969 in 3dmark 2001; for some reason it thinks that i have DX8 installed when i have DX9b!! could the feeble scores in this be due to me still using the original version of 3dmark?

In unreal i get 121 in the flyby and 45 in botmatch; theres something definately wrong there

In 3dmark 2003 i get 3181; this is lower than ne1 i have seen with the similar gfx card and processor.

What shall i do; if the card was faulty surely it would run at all?

i have played halo and the performance is worse than a slow powerpoint show

can someone help me in my desperate plea???

Faulty card - Well you could certainly contact support about that.

I too have recently purchased a 9600 Pro 128 (the Tyan version), and was hoping to smoke my old Geforce 4 Ti4200 in all benchmarks, and I have except for 3dmark 2001. My current system specs:

Athlon XP 2200+ (stock speed)
MSI K7N2 Delta ISLR mobo
GeIL 512 Megs PC3200 CL2

3dmark 2003 scores come up at around 8000 (sorry, no specific numbers, I'm running from memory here as I can't bench it atm)
Aquamark comes out at 25,000+
And with 3dmark 2001 I get around 10800. Back in the day I was able to pull 11k out of my GF4 with 3dmark 2001, but I can't remember if I was OCing the card or if that was simply from tweaking on my memory with my old mobo and RAM. After I bought the card I upgraded to the MSI board and the faster RAM, hoping that having 8x AGP and faster RAM would help out, but it only helped a little. So to a degree I'm a little disapointed with the 3dmark 2001 scores, but all other benchmarks look good, and I have noticed performance increases in a couple of games. So overall I think it was worth it. Not to mention I'll be able to play Half Life 2 (someday) and Doom 3.

god i hate benchmarks

You didnt wipe windows when you changed from nvidia card to ati? That's probably a major cause of the problems (and why it thinks you have a dx8 card in 3dmark) try searching for detonator destroyer or similar to clear out all the old nvidia stuff, or reinstall windows.