x800 posting Awful scores

[dandlewood]

My x800 was posting 1800 FPS for the 3d balls, now it's posting 6fps. any ideas?


I did try to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. no dice.

[David (PassMark)]

Maybe hardware acceleration is turned off in DirectX (see, dxdiag.exe) or in the video card device driver control panel?

[dandlewood]

I checked all hardware acceleration, no dice. Also, what's odd is that I'm getting 35 FPS on complex and only 6 on simple. does that help diagnose the issue?

[David (PassMark)]

So the problem is only for 3D in a window and not for full screen 3D?

We have (in the past) seen some drivers that fail to do windowed hardware 3D acceleration in cases like when there are dual monitors.

Years ago there were also video cards that couldn't deal with hardware acceleration while running in high resolutions (even if the 3D window is small).

Did anything change in your system around the time that the score dropped. e.g. a new video card device driver was installed?

[dandlewood]

Let me start off by saying, I fixed the problem. I now get 2100 FPS on simple, 350 on mid and 35 on complex. Performance test worked fine prior to my installation of .net framwork 2.0. I had a mom.exe error (typical ATI error when 2.0 isn't installed) but the card worked fine. Installing .net framework 2.0 and reinstalling the drivers got rid of all errors but produced my 6.4 FPS problem. I'm not sure why, but after much toying around with my PC I uninstalled windows blinds and my numbers returned to normal. I don't understand software mechanics enough to understand why that happened, or how it's related to the installation of .net framework 2.0, but I'm glad that my numbers are where they should be. (4800+(939), 2gigs ram, X800, K8n ultra MB: 655)

[David (PassMark)]

This is not the only report we have had of the Windows Blinds program effect video benchmark scores.

We are also not sure how this is related to .NET2.0. But I think it is fair to say that any 3rd party software that 'skins' the Windows interface has the potential to effect the video performance.

Thanks for posting the resolution to your problem for others to read.